Jim Hawk discusses Toyo North America's expansion of its plant in White. CLICK HERE or on the photo above for the video interview.

Toyo Tire North America Manufacturing Inc. broke ground on a $270 million expansion to its plant in White Aug. 26, citing a Georgia employee-training program as spurring the development sooner than expected.

Shozo Kibata, senior managing executive officer and president of parent company Toyo Tire Holdings of Americas Inc. in Cypress, Calif., said during a champagne toast at the groundbreaking that training provided by the state’s Quick Start program prompted the expansion a year ahead of schedule.

Quick Start has a full-time project coordinator and as many as a dozen employees working with Toyo.  The program has trained all of the employees at the Georgia plant and has agreed to work with the 400 expected to be brought in after the expansion.

The 820,000-square-foot addition will allow Toyo to nearly double the White plant’s 420 employees, as well as doubling output and total investment in the area when complete in 2011.

Jim Hawk, president and plant manager of the Bartow County subsidiary, told GlobalAtlanta in a video interview that the state training program was a deciding factor in locating the plant in Georgia in 2004.

“They looked at other sites in Alabama, Mississippi and the surrounding states,” he said.  “But what really tipped the scales was the Quick Start training program.”

The program continues to train Toyo employees and create manuals for the company.  “They’ve become our training department, literally in-house,” Mr. Hawk said.

He added that other advantages to the site about 50 miles northwest of Atlanta include easy railroad and highway access.

The groundbreaking ceremony drew officials from Toyo’s international headquarters in Osaka, Japan, including Kazuo Nagai, senior managing executive officer and chief director of tire business for Toyo Tire & Rubber Co.

Shozo Kibata toasts Georgia Quick Start at the plant expansion groundbreaking ceremony.

Masanobu Toshii, Japan’s deputy consul general for the Southeast, made the trip from Atlanta, as did Daiji Kira, director of the Japan External Trade Organization, or JETRO’s Southeast office.

State Rep. Earl Ehrhart of Powder Springs thanked the Toyo delegation for investing in Bartow County.  Heidi Green, deputy commissioner of the Georgia Department of Economic Development, also attended the groundbreaking.

Toyo has contracted Kajima Construction Corp., a Tokyo-based company that it has worked with in Japan, to build the new plant facilities.

Mr. Hawk said that Toyo imported its products from Japan to the U.S. before the White plant opened in 2005.  The entry point in California helped build sales on the West Coast, but establishing the plant in Georgia provided potential to expand to other regions.

The company’s marketing strategy in the U.S. focuses on selling to independent companies in different regions, like Ellenwood-based Kauffman Tire Inc. in the Southeast, rather than mass merchandisers or “discount clubs.”

Mr. Hawk, a native of Akron, Ohio, became the first non-Japanese corporate officer of Toyo Tire & Rubber when promoted to head the White subsidiary in April 2008.  He said he may have been destined to work in the tire business, as his hometown was known as the “rubber capital of the world” until an industry decline in the 1980s.