Five years after their strategic cooperation was established, Daimler and the Renault-Nissan Alliance have significantly expanded their collaboration with the start of a manufacturing joint venture in Aguascalientes in central Mexico.

The new business entity COMPAS (Cooperation Manufacturing Plant Aguascalientes) is 50:50 owned by Daimler and Nissan. The partners will invest a total of US$1 billion in COMPAS which will oversee the construction and operation of a manufacturing plant for the production of next-generation premium compact vehicles for the brands Mercedes-Benz and Infiniti.

The state-of-the-art plant will be located near the Nissan Aguascalientes A2 plant. It will have an initial annual production capacity of more than 230,000 vehicles and will create about 3,600 direct jobs by 2020.  Depending on the market development and customer demand, there will be the potential to add additional capacity. Production of Infiniti vehicles will begin in 2017, first Mercedes-Benz vehicles will roll off the line in 2018.

COMPAS is led by an international management team from Daimler and Nissan: Ryoji Kurosawa is Chief Executive Officer (CEO); Uwe Jarosch is Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Glaucio Leite is Chief Quality Officer (CQO).