Nissan Motor held a groundbreaking ceremony on Saturday for the construction of its new global head office, in Yokohama, where it was founded over 70 years ago.
Nissan Motor Co held a groundbreaking ceremony on Saturday for the construction of its new global head office, scheduled to be completed in late 2009, in Yokohama, where Japan's second-largest automaker was founded more than 70 years ago.
Nissan said it will spend about Y42 billion ($A445.74 million) building the new office in the city's waterfront redevelopment area of Minato Mirai.
About 2,500 of Nissan's 3,000 employees based at the current headquarters in Tokyo will move to the new 80,000-square-metre Yokohama office by October 2009, after its completion, the automaker said.
“Today, we made a big step forward,” Nissan President Carlos Ghosn said, speaking Japanese, at a party after the ceremony at a Yokohama hotel.
“The new head office has been designed in the image of a sailing ship departing for the open sea” in the hope that it becomes Nissan's next global centre for future growth.
The 99-metre-high Yokohama head office will consist of 22 floors and two underground levels, it said, adding the first and second floors will comprise a showroom for its products and technology.
Yokohama is where Nissan was founded as Jidosha-Seizo Co in 1933. It adopted its current name the following year.
In 1968, Nissan relocated its head office to Tokyo's Ginza district.
Nissan believes the new Yokohama office will enable it to have much closer collaboration with its key manufacturing facilities and suppliers in the region.
Nissan had been looking for a new location for its headquarters functions as its Tokyo office is now too small to keep up with its growing operations.
To attract major companies to the new bay area, the Yokohama city government offers tax breaks, and Nissan was the first to respond to the initiative.
“I'm very happy that a long-awaited groundbreaking ceremony finally took place,” Yokohama Mayor Hiroshi Nakada said at the party. “Yokohama's prosperity is going to be Nissan's prosperity. Nissan's prosperity is going to be Yokohama's prosperity.”
