Research On The Site Selection Of Citic Dicastal’s New Plant In Mexico

CITIC Dicastal is a Chinese state-owned manufacturing company specialized on automotive aluminum wheels,castings,profiles and innovations.As the world economy continues to develop,manufacturing costs keep increasing and customer demand for localization grows stronger,CITIC Dicastal conducted the analysis,which indicates that its existing plant in America could not meet the localization requirements of customers in the North American region and its overall strategic layout plan.Therefore,it plans to build a new plant in Mexico in order to meet the flexible market conditions and market orders to address the high tariff and logistics costs during epidemic outbreak.Also,in order to meet the market situation and the change of market demand,to solve the high tariff and logistics transportation cost in the form of the epidemic,CITIC Dicastal will plan to build a new factory in Mexico to meet the company’s operation development and strategic planning.The context shows that company will take the site selection of CITIC Dicastal’s new factory in Mexico as the research topic.Firstly,the company analyzes and determines the site selection factors by fully investigating the current situation of domestic and foreign research,combining the relevant experience of overseas plant construction domestically and abroad,referring to the theories of location theory,industrial agglomeration theory,transaction cost theory,new economic geography theory,urban value chain theory and central place theory,then the company categorizes the cost factors that affect the initial investment,operational investment and return on investment,and the non-cost factors that affect the later stage of plant as well as the non-cost factors that affect the stability and durability of the operation and the future development prospect of the plant are categorized.Secondly,the seven alternative plots are fully compared and analyzed by cost factors including transportation cost,construction cost,labor cost,energy cost,raw material cost and non-cost factors such as location and transportation,availability of labor resources,number of surrounding vehicle manufacturing plants,number of competitors,tax rate,preferential policies,security environment,climate and education level.Finally,a fuzzy mathematical evaluation method was used to evaluate the location of the new plant in Mexico by using the OWA operator to improve the hierarchical analysis method to calculate the weights of different influencing factors,and the site in Coahuila was selected as the best site for the new plant in Mexico after the experts in different fields rated the seven alternative plots.The site selection study will not only solve the needs of CITIC Dicastal’s overseas factory layout planning and localized supply to customers,but also it shares the site selection experience as a guideline for Chinese enterprises which intends to make investments abroad in the future.