Auburn Gains Eleventh Automotive Parts Supplier Plant

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). Auburn, Alabama is in high cotton with the booming automotive business in Alabama these days. GMB Automotive USA, LLC (Compton, California; Changwon, Republic of Korea) has recently announced that it will construct the company’s first U.S. manufacturing plant to produce automotive powertrain components for the Hyundai plant in nearby Montgomery, as well as for the Kia plant to be built in West Point, Georgia (which is now in limbo because of the parent company’s present corporate scandal woes).

Construction is scheduled to begin later this summer at a site in the Auburn Industrial Park, off the Shug Jackson Parkway. As yet, bids for an engineer & design firm and a general contractor have not gone out, but that will more than likely occur some time in June. It is not known at this time exactly how, or if, the Kia’s will affect the plans of GMB to construct this plant. The plant is expected to be operative by the spring of 2007.

GMB plans to employ 200 workers at full production. In a larger city, that might be nothing to worry about, but the small city of Auburn already has ten automotive parts manufacturing plants and tremendous competition from nearby Opelika, Cottondale and Tuscaloosa, so one might wonder where all those 200 workers will come from. Auburn’s unemployment rate is 2.3%, which must be about the lowest in the nation. Not to worry, though… the well-prepared city and county economic development entities have foreseen that problem.

Several years ago, at the beginning of the automotive industry boom in the South, they formed the Auburn Training Connection, which is composed of local industry leaders, the city, and local educational institutions (Auburn University, Southern Union) to recruit and train potential employees for local industry.

So far, the results of this effort have been phenomenal, and they foresee no imminent shortages in the availability of trained labor for the new plant. Overall, the automotive industry provides the state of Alabama with somewhere around 35,000 direct jobs, and many more indirectly.

Auburn’s automotive industry includes just about all phases of the parts manufacturing business, including extrusion and plastics, automotive electronics, tire and tire materials, metal processing, seating and interior trim, metal stamping, transmissions, engine assembly, and others. Other Auburn automotive suppliers include Donaldson Company (air filtration systems), Hoerbiger Hydraulics (automotive hydraulics), Hoerbiger Drivetech USA (clutch plates), Nikki America Fuel Systems, Pyongsan America (hose pipe assemblies), SCA, Incorporated (plastic components), Stahlschmidt & Maiworm USA (wheels), Briggs & Stratton (engine assembly), Falk Corporation (gear couplings), and Cumberland Plastic Systems, among others.

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