ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times

DATE: Saturday, April 26, 1997               TAG: 9704280125
SECTION: BUSINESS                 PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO 
DATELINE: CORDOBA, ARGENTINA
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES 

ARGENTINE PLANT MARKS CHRYSLER'S OVERSEAS EFFORT TRUCKS TO BE MADE IN BRAZIL

Chrysler Corp. opened its first new assembly plant in the developing world since 1965 on Friday, one of a series of steps Chrysler is taking to return to international markets it abandoned in its brush with bankruptcy in the late 1970s.

Chrysler, which currently sells 8 percent of its vehicles outside North America, plans to raise that proportion to 20 percent early in the next century, and would eventually like 25 percent of its sales to be overseas, said Francois Castaing, the automaker's executive vice president for international operations.

A large part of those sales will come in Brazil and Argentina, where the prospects for further sales growth are much greater than in East Asia, said Robert Eaton, Chrysler's chairman and chief executive.

Having set up a European distribution network and a minivan assembly plant in Graz, Austria, in the early 1990s, Chrysler is now focusing on the Latin American market. The factory here will build up to 20,000 Jeep Grand Cherokees and Cherokees a year. In Brazil, Chrysler is building a Dodge Dakota pickup assembly plant and an engine plant in a joint venture with BMW.

At the same time, Chrysler has just canceled plans to build an assembly plant in Vietnam, citing the crush of other automakers that are building plants there.

Like other automakers that are setting up shop in Latin America, Chrysler is using its steel-walled factory as a laboratory for the latest management and manufacturing ideas.

Nearby factories just completed by multinational auto-parts companies assemble entire seats, dashboards and other complex systems and ship them here to be bolted together into Jeeps on a short assembly line.

The parts are scheduled to arrive every two hours, so little room has been set aside for the costly storage of inventory. And the workers in the assembly plant are organized in groups of 10, with each ``cell'' choosing its leader instead of being supervised by a foreman.

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