A top executive with Caterpillar Inc., the world’s largest maker of earth-moving construction and mining equipment, said Friday the company plans to spend more than $1 billion to increase its manufacturing capacity in China.
In an interview at an event tied to the U.S. visit this week of Chinese President Hu Jintao, Rich Lavin, a group president at Caterpillar, said his company’s current network of 11 Chinese plants was not enough to produce the “market-leading volumes” Caterpillar hopes to be producing by 2015.
Lavin said the company, which has spent over $1 billion over the past three or four years increasing its manufacturing and research and development footprint in the world’s second-largest economy, would spend “a similar amount over the next three or four years.”
“Our growth in China today is capacity constrained,” he said. “We have very aggressive plans to build our capacity over the three years.”
