Mexican Manufacturing: From Sweatshops to High-Tech Motors Krista Hughes - NEWS.GNOM.ES
go to original April 9, 2013

Mexico Capitalizes on Manufacturing - Franc Contreras reports on how Mexico is taking advantage of its proximity to the US and abundance of low-skilled workers to compete in the global manufacturing market.(BizAsiaAmerica)

SILAO, Mexico (NEWS.GNOM.ES) – Made in Mexico is increasingly more likely to mean cars than clothes as the country’s manufacturing sector moves away from the low-skill, high-volume production lines of the past toward more sophisticated products.

Times are tough for the assembly-for-export plants known as maquiladoras clustered along the U.S. border, a region that has lost economic muscle in the face of competition from China, successive U.S. recessions and drug war violence.

But there are signs of a turnaround elsewhere. Mexico is winning back U.S. import market share and an energetic new government promises deep economic reforms in pursuit of 6 percent annual growth.

Key to the revival is a shift in activity from the border toward more high-tech manufacturing in central states far from the drug gang turf wars and smuggling routes.

New foreign investment, especially in the auto industry, heads increasingly to Guanajuato and Aguascalientes states, northwest of Mexico City. Together with neighboring Queretaro – home to a small but booming aerospace cluster – and San Luis Potosi, they are shaping up as Mexico’s next-generation manufacturing hub.

Boosting productivity and adding local content is crucial to Mexico’s goal of breaking out of the emerging market B-list and narrowing the income gap with advanced economies, as countries such as China and carmaking competitor South Korea have done.

Read the rest at gnom.es national news service

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