Toyota to take 5% stake in Mazda; to build joint plant

Toyota said on Friday that it was taking a 5% stake in Mazda, another Japanese automaker, and that the companies would jointly build an assembly plant in the United States and would pool resources on new technologies.

The factory’s location has not been decided, but Toyota and Mazda said they hoped the first vehicles would roll off its production lines in 2021. The plant is expected to cost $1.6 billion and to employ about 4,000 workers, they said.

Akio Toyoda, chief executive of Toyota, said in January that the carmaker would invest $10 billion in the United States over the next five years. Although plans for that spending predated the election of President Donald Trump, the announcement was widely seen as a response to Trump’s vows to promote US manufacturing, pushing back against countries like Japan that have large trade surpluses with the United States.

Mixing appeals, rebukes and state-sponsored enticements, Trump has pushed both American and foreign-owned companies to locate factories in the United States rather than in lower-wage countries.

Even before Trump was sworn in, the heating and cooling giant Carrier agreed to cut the number of jobs it planned to move to Mexico from an Indiana plant after the state added $7 million in incentives.

Last week, the Taiwanese electronics supplier Foxconn joined Trump at the White House to announce its plans to locate a new plant with 3,000 positions in Wisconsin, which lured the company with a staggering $3 billion in state tax credits.

The announcement by Toyota and Mazda earned a congratulatory tweet from the president early Friday.

“Toyota & Mazda to build a new $1.6 billion plant here in the USA and create 4K new American jobs. A great investment in American manufacturing!” he wrote.