Mazda is planning to launch an all-new plant in Mexico during the 2013 fiscal year. When it opens, the plant will serve as the automaker’s export base for North America and Europe.

“The size of Mexico’s market is a mere 900,000 units, but there’s a 40 million unit market behind this,” said Mazda Motor Corp. President Takashi Yamanouchi in an interview with the Mainichi Daily News.

Yamanouchi suggested that the Mexican plant will eventually serve as a supply base for the global market in the future. In the near term, it will be used mainly to supply cars to Brazil, as well as North America.

Because of the free trade agreement between Mexico and the European Union, as well as the North American Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, the United States and Canada, exporting completed vehicles from Mexico to Europe and North America entails no tariffs. This would give the automaker’s planned plant a positional advantage.

In addition to discussing the automaker’s new plant, Yamanouchi also announced that Mazda’s production volume, which dropped in the wake of the March 11 earthquake in Japan, had returned to normal in July.

“Due to the quake disaster, we suffered a 20 percent production cutback between April and June compared to a year earlier, but our output returned to almost 100 percent in June and we have been able to produce without constraints in July.”