"More than two years ago we started our project and the key focus from the beginning was to achieve a high US Dollar sourcing share, which we were successful in doing. In the second step, we tried to involve more local business from here in the Chattanooga and Tennessee area and we encouraged worldwide cooperating contractors to involve local business. That was successful with the construction of the factory and we had more than 50% of local companies involved. "In the third step, we are going even further and this will involve making our US and Canadian suppliers more visible to the decision makers that will be attending the IZB in Wolfsburg," Fischer said.

“We’ve got a good start, but we’re also very firmly with our feet planted on the ground,” Browning told reporters today at a news conference in Washington. “We know we’ve got a lot of work to do with a lot of facets of the business. We have still not passed our 1970s sales record.”

“This is great timing,” Frank Fischer, who will run the plant, said yesterday in an interview at the site as he prepared for the project’s wall-raising ceremony. “Construction prices are down and the availability of resources is immense.”

In a time of smaller business investment nationwide, Tennessee is leading the country in landing the biggest business deals. Among the top 10 biggest business announcements in North America last year, two were in Tennessee, according to the annual report of such deals by Site Selection magazine. The $1 billion Volkswagen auto assembly plant in Chattanooga announced in July and the $1.2 billion Hemlock Semiconductor Corp. polysilicon plant, which will make solar-panel components, in Clarksville, Tenn., announced in December were among only $3 billion business deals on the Site Selection list for 2008.