Ford announced that it will pay $77.9 million to purchase a 72.4% stake in the state-owned Automobile Craiova plant in Romania, with the other 27.6% held by a variety of employee pension schemes. Ford plans to use the former Daewoo plant to increase its production capacity in Europe. The deal is set to be signed on September 12th at the Frankfurt Motor Show.
While the plant only produced 24,000 cars and 116,000 engines last year, Ford plans to increase its capacity to 300,000 cars and engines annually. Ford will also be increasing the workforce from about 3,900 employees to as many as 9,000. Ford officials said the upgrades are expected to be completed by 2012 with a cost of $1.37 billion.
According to The Detroit News, Ford Europe produced 1.86 million vehicles at seven assembly plants in 2006.
