Dell Inc. on Tuesday said it will open a third U.S. manufacturing plant, a plant in North Carolina employing 1,500 workers, marking a rare example of a U.S. high-tech company expanding domestic production.

Dell, the world's largest personal computer maker, said the new desktop personal computer production plant will open in the Triad area of central North Carolina in the fall of 2005 and employ about 700 employees during its first year.

The North Carolina plant will grow to 1,500 workers within five years and supply business and consumer PC customers in the Eastern United States, Dell said. It also operates U.S. plants in Tennessee and Austin, Texas, where Dell is headquartered.

Dell is alone among major U.S. computer manufacturers in locating manufacturing plants in the United States. Other major PC makers depend upon contract manufacturers mostly located in Asia to build PCs and other electronic products at low cost.

While Dell depends on electronics components from Asian suppliers, as rivals do, its strategy is to assemble its PCs as close to customers as possible, arguing that the costs of logistics and distributions are greater than U.S. labor costs.

In its latest fiscal year, Dell employed 22,200 in the United States, an increase of 1,000 jobs from the prior year. It had 50,000 employees worldwide in July. It has four other production plants, in Ireland, Malaysia, China and Brazil.

(From Reuters, November 09, 2004)

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