Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. is making a contrarian bet: The maker of Subaru cars is cranking up domestic manufacturing at a time when its domestic rivals are expanding overseas to escape the strong yen.
The carmaker said this month it plans to increase domestic production to account for 78 percent of output during the fiscal year ending next March, compared with 73 percent the previous year. Fuji Heavy said that expanding capacity in Japan — instead of the United States, its biggest market — is cheaper.
"A large-scale expansion in the U.S., where we build new factory buildings and such, will cost a lot," Chief Financial Officer Mitsuru Takahashi said in a May 18 interview in Tokyo. "We're not like Toyota, Honda or Nissan, so it's not appropriate for us to make sudden, big investments."