We’ve been pondering a bit of late, and it is the humble truck axle that is the cause of our ruminations. A couple of days ago, reports reached us that Tata was having a sniff at American Axle and Manufacturing. No surprise here – Tata is buying everything it can lay its hands upon at the moment. For example, Corus Steel is being courted by the Indian leviathan in a mooted £5 billion deal. BTW, don’t call your broker now. But, just for reference, you could have come in at $16.93 and got out at $18.06 in the space of a couple of hours with AXL.N. Easy money.
Digging a little bit deeper, we now see that another Indian monolith, Bharat Forge, the world’s second biggest forging operator, is rumoured to be having a nose around bit of ArvinMeritor. AM already has a JV with BF, and, intriguingly, is currently out of favour with most US based analysts. KeyBanc doesn’t quite rate it as a basket case, but most reports include a curling of the lip in the direction of the Troy, MI-based Tier 1.
From Michigan we go to Arkansas, and the opening of the next part of Hino’s quest for global domination. Tuesday saw the grand opening of Hino’s new, $160 million, 400,000- square-foot manufacturing facility in Marion. There has been continuing speculation that the facility might be expanded to a full-blown industrial truck production plant if demand for Hino medium-duty trucks increases in North America.
Good question. The US market is looking set to be a sad place in the next few months, but Hino makes its intentions very plain. Take a look at the IR section of its website, and the new, global Hino seems to be just around the corner. Given the company’s now closer links with Scania, we are starting to wonder about seemingly unrelated, random things such as VW’s overall health, and Toyota’s overall global ambitions ..............