Latin American’s leading steelmaker is set to make a billion-dollar investment to enlarge its plant in Nuevo León, President López Obrador announced at his morning news conference on Tuesday.

Ternium will expand its factory in the Ternium Industrial Center in Pesquería, 50 kilometers east of Monterrey.

“Yesterday Paolo Rocca was here, an investor who works in steel, his company is called … Ternium. They came to tell me that they’re going to expand their plant in Nuevo León and that they’re going to invest a billion dollars … they manufacture pipe and work in the automotive industry …” the president said.

He added that the investment plan was evidence of Mexico’s bright economic future. “In their research and market analysis … they saw a promising economic and commercial future for Mexico, they came to inform me of that … this means jobs, it means well-being.”

The president also said signs were good for the Mexican economy, despite a technical recession and high inflation. “We are also verifying the data on foreign investment which will soon be released … in January there was record job creation, and see how we are doing in February … the economy is growing,” he said.

In 2017, Ternium invested around 1.1 billion pesos (US $58.2 million in 2017) to install a hot rolling plant at its site in Pesquería.

The almost one kilometer hot roller produced its first million tonnes of laminated steel in January. It can produce 4.4 tonnes of laminated steel per year, the newspaper El Financiero reported.

In 2019, the electroplating and painting lines at the Ternium Industrial Center went into production. The company had already invested US $2.52 billion prior to the president’s announcement.

Ternium has plants in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, the United States and Central America. It belongs to the Argentinian conglomerate Techint.

With reports from Reforma, Forbes México and El Financiero