”Exports from Nissan’s Mexico plant Nissan to Brazil would be reduced significantly after the countries agreed to limit their bilateral trade of light vehicles over a period of three years,” said Nissan Mexico’s CEO, José Muñoz.
The manager warned that because of these changes, Global Nissan decided to accelerate the construction of the plant in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in order to be ready late next year and not by 2014 as planned earlier. This decision is aimed to not affect the company as much as the decision ACE-55 did.
On Monday, Mexican authorities announced that the fee that Nissan would have to pay export to Brazil this year is $90 million.
When questioned by reporters about the cap against the results of 2011, the year the company topped Mexican exports of vehicles to South American giants, the manager said “significantly lower”.
Muñoz recalled that last year Brazil exported 45,000 Nissan Mexicana and Versa units in March and by 2012, that number went up to 95,000.
“That means we were not be able to carry out and unfortunately, we had made the purchase of the parts,” he added.
After recording a deficit of $1.170 billion in its trade-in cars with Mexico in 2011, Brazil faked to break a bilateral agreement if Mexico did not renegotiate to set temporary quotas to protect its industry from getting hit by the overvaluation of its currency.
In the end, the two nations agreed to set limits on the number of car exports with a “temporary scheme incremental” to 1.450 million in 2012, 1.560 million in 2013, and 1.640 million in 2014.
Mexico to Brazil exported vehicles was worth 2.400 billion in 2011, according to local officials.
Brazil and Mexico agreed to reinstate the Agreement of Economic Complementation 55 (ACE-55) in 2015.
José Muñoz added that the company expects an increase of 2.2% in its total exports by 2012, to 420,000 units.
