China’s Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Co (JAC) is teaming up with Mexican company Giant Motors Latinoamerica to localize its sport utility vehicles (SUVs), but analysts doubt the wisdom of a move which will target customers in Mexico, and Central and South America. The two companies will invest a total of USD212 million to expand the capacity of a plant owned by Giant Motors in Ciudad Sahagun, Hidalgo province. Giant Motors will start producing SUVs at the plant within two months, with 1,000 vehicles in the first year and the goal of making 10,000 per year by 2021. JAC sold 367,300 passenger vehicles in 2016, a year-on-year increase of 6.09%, including 27,500 SUVs. John Zeng, Managing Director of LMC Automotive Consulting Shanghai, said it would be cheaper to export cars to those countries from Mexico than from China, adding that JAC could have built a plant in South America instead of Mexico. Yale Zhang, Managing Director of consulting firm Automotive Foresight, said several other Chinese automakers had contemplated building plants in Mexico, but all of them saw it as a natural gateway to the United States and Canada, a much larger market than South America. Mexico is the world’s fourth-biggest car exporter. It produced 3.46 million cars in 2016, exporting 2.77 million, with three quarters of them to the U.S., according to local industry association AMIA.