Aiming for medium- to long-term business expansion in the HVAC market of North America, Daikin Industries is establishing a new base in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, through its subsidiary Goodman in an investment worth around $410m.

The new 350,000sq m base is being established to integrate the four factories that Goodman currently operates in the United States and the logistics base. In addition, the new facility will consolidate marketing and customer support activities to provide even greater operational efficiencies within the company. Construction of the new site will begin shortly, with base operations scheduled to start mid-2016.

Since the Goodman acquisition in 2012, Daikin has increased business in the North America region by using the strengths of both companies. However, greater production capacity has become essential for achieving further growth. Together with enhancing Goodman production facilities, the new base will showcase Daikin's state-of-the-art production technology that is expanding to every region of the world and aim for significant gains in productivity to achieve non-stop creation of cost competitive products. Other expected benefits include optimal logistics efficiency through the melding of production and logistics in the integration of the logistics base with the four factories dispersed within the United States; inventory reduction through the sharing of components; and significant shortening of lead-time through improved efficiency in the delivery of finished products.

In response to the tightening of energy regulations in the North American HVAC market, demand is rising for high efficiency in residential-use unitary air conditioning equipment, and greater sales of premium zone products are expected. Although sales first began at Goodman last year for residential-use products incorporating high-efficiency inverter technology, Goodman plans to also aggressively launch similar products for this fiscal year.