Hitachi Ltd. said Britain's vote to quit the European Union may become more of a concern when the conglomerate's train factory in northern England becomes more reliant on exports after 2019.
For the next few years the plant in Newton Aycliffe will be busy making the vehicles it was set up to build when Hitachi won Britain's biggest express-train contract, so there has been "no direct damage" from the Brexit vote, Hiroaki Nakanishi, the company's chairman, said in an interview Friday.
"The U.K. rolling-stock factory is already full up to 2019," Nakanishi said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "Afterwards maybe we need to make some sort of products to be exported, and that might be troublesome. But up to 2019 we don't have any problems about the factory's operation."