Jaguar Land Rover signs contract manufacturing agreement with Austria’s Magna Steyr

Tata Motors-owned luxury carmaker Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) yesterday said it had signed a contract manufacturing agreement with Austrian automotive firm Magna Steyr, taking another step to enhance its worldwide production line and build global footprint.

Magna Steyr, an operating unit of Magna International Inc, would build a number of future JLR vehicles in Graz, Austria, under the latest collaboration, aimed at creating additional volumes needed to support the company's plans to achieve further growth.

''The UK remains at the centre of our design, engineering and manufacturing capabilities. Partnerships such as this will complement our UK operations and engineering,'' JLR CEO Ralf Speth said in a statement.

''Today marks another step in building our global footprint. This agreement will allow us to expand our award-winning model range as customers around the world demand ever-more innovative vehicles from Jaguar Land Rover,'' he said.

The last five years had seen JLR double sales to over 4,62,000 vehicles, double employment to over 35,000 people and invest over £10 billion in new product creation and capital expenditure.

The company had also made investments in several UK vehicle manufacturing facilities at Castle Bromwich, Halewood and Solihull in the West Midlands region of England to support the introduction of 10 new vehicles, including the Jaguar XE, Jaguar F-TYPE, Range Rover Evoque and Land Rover Discovery Sport.

The company which had an operation on a smaller scale in India had in October last year opened a 130,000-vehicle-a-year plant north of Shanghai with local manufacturer Chery Automobile. Another 24,000-vehicle plant was under construction in Brazil and JLR also operated smaller local assembly facilities in Kenya, Malaysia, Pakistan and Turkey.

JLR did not specify when production would be expected to get under way at Magna's plant in Graz or which vehicles would be built there, saying only that ''entire future cars'' would be made at the site.

The car maker denied the contractor arrangement would affect the reputation that JLR had as a premium UK brand, saying the business would continue to be ''absolutely a British manufacturer with our foundations in the UK''.

The past five years had seen the company invest £10 billion in research and new plants and plans to spend a further £3.6 billion in 2015-16.