Kawasaki commits to Yonkers

Kawasaki Rail Car Inc. will keep hundreds of jobs in downtown Yonkers with a $25-million investment in its U.S. corporate headquarters and manufacturing plant there, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced Thursday.

The company will buy and renovate the facility it currently leases at i.park Hudson in the former Otis Elevator Co. complex. Empire State Development Corp., the state agency, awarded Kawasaki a $500,000 capital grant for the project.

Kawasaki employs 375 full-time manufacturing workers in Yonkers, where the company has been based since 1985. It secures an average of $460 million a year in contracts, according to state officials, and produces some 180 rail cars a year for various transportation authorities, including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority”™s New York City Transit, Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.

Two years ago, the Yonkers manufacturer was directed by its parent company, Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd. in Japan, to find a permanent base for its U.S. operations. The company considered multiple sites, including New Jersey and Nebraska, where Kawasaki 10 years ago opened a state-of-the-art plant in Lincoln, the state capital. The Yonkers plant”™s location at the center of the nation”™s busiest passenger rail corridor in the Northeast proved most cost-effective for the rail-car maker.

“We are very happy to stay in our New York home,” Kawasaki Rail Car Inc. CEO Hiroji Iwasaki said in a written statement. “We had considered locations outside New York state for this, but based upon the tremendous quality of our workforce here as well as the help provided by Empire State Development, the decision was an easy one to make. Kawasaki”™s philosophy is ”˜customer first,”™ and this proximity will allow us to respond to our customers”™ needs in a timely manner.”