An international auto supplier is betting big on Macomb County.
Grupo Antolin of Spain is investing $61.2 million in a plant to produce, assemble and sequence door panels for the next-generation Ram pickup and will create 430 jobs, according to the company.
“That is a very big thing here in Shelby Township,” said Shelby Township Supervisor Richard Stathakis. “It’ll be the crowning achievement of our township industrial sector.”
Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel is among the officials scheduled to speak Wednesday afternoon at Cherry Creek Corporate Park, near 23 Mile and M-53 in Shelby Township.
The Antolin Shelby facility, expected to be open for business by the end of the year, was awarded a $3.6 million Michigan Business Development Program grant in return for a commitment to create the jobs. The Michigan Economic Development Corp. said that Michigan was chosen for the project over a competing site in Illinois.
The plant will supply door panels to Fiat Chrysler Automobiles for the 2019 Ram pickup. Fiat Chrysler is moving production of the pickup from Warren Truck Assembly, where Ram built pickups for decades, to Sterling Heights Assembly Plant, a factory the company shut down last year to convert to pickup assembly. It had built the 200 sedan.
“This is the largest program and investment that Grupo Antolin has ever carried out in North America in its 25-year history,” the company said in a statement.
The company, which has its North American headquarters in Auburn Hills, also has facilities in Wayne, Marlette and Warren, Mich., as well as Kentucky, Illinois and Missouri, according to Automotive News, which said earlier this year that “the expansion stems from Grupo’s $525 million acquisition of Magna International Inc.’s interiors business in 2015.”
Grupo has approximately 27,795 employees, 167 facilities and 29 offices.
Brad Bates, deputy supervisor, said the park’s proximity to automotive plants in Sterling Heights and Warren was the key to landing the project.
“We’ve found that the main attraction to this location for this development is the access to the Van Dyke and Mound Road industrial corridor,” he said. “It gives them time to make those immediate just-in-time deliveries as suppliers.”
The addition of the 360,000-square-foot Grupo facility will bring the total square footage of facilities at the corporate park (all built since 2012) to 1.2 million and the number of employees to 1,480, according to the township.
