Fluor Daniel Wins $100-Million BMW Contract to Build Auto Plant in S.C. : Construction: The 1.5-million-square-foot facility will be the luxury car maker’s first American operation.

Fluor Daniel Inc., the international engineering and construction firm, has received a $100-million contract from BMW to build the luxury car firm’s first American plant.

Fluor Daniel has built facilities for nearly all the major car manufacturers, but this is its first contract with Munich-based Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, said Fluor Daniel spokeswoman Deborah Land. “From our standpoint, BMW is a very prestigious company to work for. It’s a first-class organization, and that’s pretty exciting,” she said.

It is the largest automotive contract the company has signed this year, Land said.

Fluor Daniel worked on the Nissan plant in Tennessee and on a Ford paint facility in Canada. It just completed work on a Chrysler plant in Austria. “But there haven’t been any grass-roots, from-the-ground-up (auto plant) facilities on the horizon, so this is very exciting,” Land said.

The 1.5-million-square-foot plant on 900 acres in Greer, S.C., will provide 1,000 manufacturing jobs when operations begin in 1995. Initially, the plant will produce 300 cars a day, or 15,000 cars a year, with its capacity increasing to between 500 and 600 cars a day by the end of the decade. BMW did not disclose what model would be manufactured at the South Carolina plant but did say the plant would supply cars for 100 countries.

A caravan of 170 new 740i BMWs worth $8.5 million drove in from Atlanta to launch groundbreaking for the new plant, which will create between 1,200 and 1,500 jobs during the construction phase. Contracting services will be provided out of Fluor Daniel’s Greenville, S.C., office.

Fluor Daniel is the principal subsidiary of Fluor Corp., an international engineering, construction, maintenance and technical services company.