Hino strengthens business foundation in ASEAN

Hino Motors Ltd and Hino Motors Manufacturing Thailand, Ltd (HMMT) announced that in order to achieve their vision of "Corporate strategy 2025" and enable them to respond to customer needs in close proximity, will be taking steps in Thailand, one of their key centres of operation, to accelerate its efforts to strengthen business foundation in ASEAN.

By newly appointing Mr. Somchai Pleankaew, who has an exceptional career background with Hino, to president of HMMT, we will be creating an organisational setup that will enable us to drive our business in a locally led manner. Under this new setup, we will be constructing a new centre in Bang Bo, Samutprakarn Province to consolidate and strengthen our product planning, development, and production functions for best-fit products in ASEAN.

The site has an area of roughly 400,000 sqm. Construction is scheduled to begin in July 2019 with operations to begin in 2021. The new center will consist of the new plant's production area, and a development area centred on a test track. The total investment amount is expected to be roughly 11.5 billion yen.

The Hino Group will be reforming its business structure to achieve sustainable growth leading up to 2025. We position Thailand as one of our key markets for sales in the ASEAN region, our second pillar after the Japanese market. The country is also one of its key business centres and a driver of Monozukuri and Total Support within the region.

The new centre to be constructed will consolidate and strengthen product planning,
once the factory begins operation in 2021, Hino will first start off by producing vehicles for the domestic Thai market, and expect to begin supplying ASEAN best-fit vehicles to other emerging markets by roughly 2024.