Media outlets in Georgia and South Carolina are reporting that Georgia is out of the running to house Volvo’s first U.S. assembly plant and that the Swedish car maker’s plant will likely go to a Berkeley County site in South Carolina.
The Volvo plant would have brought an investment of $500 million and 4,000 jobs to 1,900 acres just off Interstate 16 in Bryan County.
An official announcement is expected next week. On Friday, neither Volvo officials nor the executives negotiating for the finalist sites in Georgia and South Carolina would comment.
Trip Tollison, Savannah Economic Development Authority president, also had no comment when contacted Friday evening.
Volvo officials have said they hope to have the new plant ready for production by 2018, with capacity topping out at around 120,000 vehicles a year.
In the last few weeks, the competition to land Volvo’s first U.S. auto plant narrowed to the two states, and each was battling fiercely to land the project and the well-paying jobs it would bring.
Volvo, a Swedish premium automobile manufacturer owned by Zhejiang Geely Holding Group of China, announced last month it would build a U.S. plant to fill the North American gap in its manufacturing base as it continues its bid to take the luxury Volvo brand global.
Volvo was sold by Ford Motor Co. in 2010 to Zhejiang Geely, which has ratcheted up both production and investment in new models, adding two Chinese manufacturing plants to Volvo’s two European factories.
The next logical step was North America, Volvo chief executive Håkan Samuelsson said in making the original announcement.
“Volvo Cars cannot claim to be a true global car maker without an industrial presence in the U.S.,” Samuelsson said. “The U.S. is an absolutely crucial part of our global transformation, and this announcement makes it perfectly clear that Volvo is in the U.S. to stay.”
Pulling out the stops
By early April, reports had surfaced that Volvo’s search was focused on the Southeast and, on April 30, a newly established four-county development authority filed an application with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a permit to build a site just off Interstate 16 in Bryan County to construct a major manufacturing facility, widely believed to be for Volvo.
The site, some 28 miles from the Georgia Ports Authority gates, would have had all the amenities of a megasite, including road and rail access, according to the permit application brought by the Savannah Harbor-Interstate 16 Corridor Joint Development Authority of Bryan, Bulloch, Chatham and Effingham counties.
Tollison, who filed the application on behalf of the joint authority, responded with “no comment” when asked about the project, as did Bryan County Commission Chairman Jimmy Burnsed, who also chairs the joint development authority.
At the Georgia Department of Economic Development in Atlanta, spokeswoman Stefanie Paupeck Harper said, “We have no comment,” and Billy Birdwell, spokesman for the Savannah District Corps of Engineers, would only say that the permit application would go through the same process as all such requests.
Across the river in South Carolina, a request for a wetlands permit also was filed on similar property in Berkeley County, just north of Charleston, a site the state reportedly offered to Volvo.
In addition to the economic impact it’s expected to create, the new plant also means Volvo, which has been doing business in the United States since 1955, will be able to meet and ultimately exceed its medium-range volume target of selling 100,000 cars a year in the states.
In addition to becoming an integral part of Volvo’s global manufacturing footprint, serving both the U.S. and export markets, a new plant will help accelerate the introduction of build-to-order in the U.S. and help limit the impact of currency fluctuations, Volvo officials have said.