Kioti Tractor Begins Work on New Plant in North Carolina

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources Incorporated, Houston, Texas). Kioti Tractor, a division of Daedong USA Incorporated (Wilson, North Carolina), a subsidiary of Dae Dong Industrials Company Limited (Korea), will be moving into new quarters when their new 180,000 square foot plant in Wendell, Wake County, North Carolina, is finished in early 2004. The facility will include office space, an assembly area, and a distribution center. The new facility will be closer to the airport than the Wilson facility, and will be located near U.S. 64 at the Knightdale Bypass, which is expected to facilitate shipping for Kioti.

Kioti (pronounced "coyote") makes small tractors, aimed primarily at hobby farmers, and competes with the likes of John Deere, New Holland, Kubota, Komatsu, and other small tractor manufacturers. The general manager of Kioti Tractor, Marion Wilkins, has expressed the opinion that the new Wendell plant could well draw suppliers to the area, such as tire and wheel assembler Titan International Incorporated (NYSE:TWI) (Quincy, Illinois), North America's third largest manufacturer of off-highway tires.

Titan already has an assembly and distribution facility in Cartersville, Georgia, which will supply the new Kioti plant in Wendell. Titan also has another facility in Dublin, Georgia, which supplies Kioti competitor New Holland Tractors' Dublin plant. Titan also has a mounting facility in Grovetown, Georgia, which supplies the local John Deere plant, another manufacturer of small tractors. At the time of this writing, Titan has not yet committed to construction of a new assembly and distribution center in Wendell (any reports to the contrary are premature and speculative). For the present time Titan will continue supplying Kioti from its Cartersville, Georgia, facility. As Kioti Wendell grows and expands, there is always the possibility that Titan or other suppliers might consider constructing plants closer to Kioti Wendell, as it did in the case of the New Holland Tractor plant in Dublin.