Kentucky New Era Archive

February 25, 1999

By E. L. Gold

City to get Toyo Plant

Toyo Radiator plans to build plant here.

A Japanese company that manufactures automovile radiators primarily for Toyota and Mitsubishi apparently will be the second industrial recruit this week to announce plans for a new plant in Commerce Park. 

Toyo Radiator Ltd., a Tokyo-based multinational corporation with divisions or joint ventures in Japan, India, and the United States, was approved today for $1.3 million in state tax incentives to build a new factory in Hopkinsville. 

Toyo Radiator already has strong ties to Hopkinsville, a factor that apparently played a significant role in bringing the new plant to the city. 

The Tokyo company is a founding partner of CoPAR, Inc., which operates an industrial radiator plant in the older Hopkinsville Industrial Park.  Toyo bought out its Canadian and Japanese partners in CoPAR in 1991 and became the local company's sole owner, according to a Japanese news service, the Japan-U.S. Business Report. 

CoPAR was approved for a $1.5 million tax credit in September 1998 and had plans to buy the old EMS-Togo/EFTEC building across Bill Bryan Boulevard from its current plant. 

However that plan was scrapped in favor of building a new factory -- which will be a division of CoPAR -- in Commerce Park, according to a company official. 

The current CoPAR plant manufactures radiators for off-road and industrial equipment. 

A formal announcement of the new plant is set for Friday, when local economic development officials plan to take three airplaines to Frankfort for a 2 p.m. press conference with Gov. Paul Patton in the Capitol. 

Neither the local officials nor the governor's press office would confirm that the plant announcement was on the agenda for the conference.  The governor's public schedule for Friday says only that the subject of the news conference will be announced later. 

State economic development officials also declined to disclose details of the project, saying the governor's office had asked them not to release specifies until later today. 

However, preliminary estimates say the new CoPAR/Toyo plant will likely be about 90,000 square feet and could be complete late this year.  The plant will be located on a 25-acre site in the newer industrial park on Pembroke Road. 

Toyo Radiator stock is traded on the Japanese Nekkei exchange and has suffered much the same fate as others in the Far East markets. 

The stock slipped from a high of about $7 a share in 1996 to its current price of $1.30.  The drop began to level out during 1998, but the stock still lost about 40 percent of its value during the year, according to Wright Research, which also tracks stock performance of selected companies worldwide. 

Despite the slump in stock prices, the company continues to develop new products, announcing a new, lightweight all-aluminum radiator for mass-produced cars in January.  No information was available on whether this new radiator is the product planned for the Hopkinsville plant.