OSAKA -- Matsushita Communication Industrial Co., the nation's leading maker of mobile phones, is considering building a new plant in Mexico or South America to enhance overseas production, the company's president said Thursday.
"We are considering locations including Mexico and South America," Matsushita Communication President Takashi Kawada told a press conference in Moriguchi, Osaka Prefecture.
The amount, location, timing and other specifics of the investment will be decided next year, he said.
Matsushita Communication is a unit of major electronics maker Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.
The company already operates plants for car-audio equipment in the United States and Mexico, and the new plant will be its first mobile-phone manufacturing base in the Americas, where demand for next-generation models is expected to swell.
On Oct. 26, the company unveiled a plan to set up a joint venture in the Czech Republic this month that will begin manufacturing mobile phones in fall of next year. Its only other mobile-phone plant in Europe is in Britain.
It also plans to expand production at its existing mobile-phone plants in Beijing and the Philippines, company officials said.
Matsushita Communication, which has a dominant 30 percent share of the domestic cellphone market, aims to take a 10 percent share of the global market in the business year that ends in March 2004, up from the current level of between 5 percent and 6 percent.