When automotive giant General Motors fell on challenging economic times, the lingering trend adversely affected its supply chain as well, including the U.S. division of a Japanese company manufacturing automotive brakes.

That brake supplier, Akebono, has a Clarksville plant along International Boulevard in the Corporate Business Park that is on a slow decline toward permanent closure, likely to occur sometime in early to mid-2021, officials have confirmed.

Akebono is, in fact, closing two U.S. plants as part of its corporate business turnaround plan. There is another one in Columbia, South Carolina, affected, along with the Clarksville facility.

The U.S. plants will be closing in March 2021, or within a matter of weeks after that time, because of “the reduction of sales,” as it's been termed.

Frank Tate, executive director of the Clarksville-Montgomery County Industrial Development Board, said it's been known for several months that Clarksville's Akebono plant is on a downhill skid toward permanent closure, and COVID-19 has delayed the inevitable, to some extent.

But the building that Akebono still occupies is already being marketed by the local Economic Development Council to any other takers that would be deemed a good fit for the industrial park.

Tate said it's an estimated 700,000-square-foot building that has as its neighbors in the industrial park Bridgestone Metalpha and Sanderson Pipe.

"The EDC is representing the building in the marketplace, and we are actively talking with potential projects to take the place of Akebono there. As far as what that could potentially be, right now it's wide open, although it could very well be an automotive-related business just because of the size of the building," he said.

At its height locally, Akebono has had up to 350 employees, but the total number on its payroll is slowly being scaled back.

"Akebono has started working with (Clarksville-based) Workforce Essentials and the state with job fairs to try to help their employees transition to jobs elsewhere," Tate said, adding that Akebono continues to have a "great relationship" with his office and other local agencies despite the impending plant closure.

The Japanese-owned Akebono Clarksville plant was formerly German-owned Bosch, which was also a brake manufacturer.

Akebono bought out Bosch, and the switch was first announced locally in 2010.

Since that time Akebono had expanded the Clarksville plant twice, first in 2013 and then in 2015 when the company invested $48 million in expanding its facility and updating equipment.

"The GM situation has had a significant impact, and with GM downsizing, it was a challenge for Akebono as a supplier to GM as well," Tate said.

"When will Akebono be officially gone from Clarksville? Right now it's hard to say. They were originally expecting to be gone in March of next year, but COVID has led to some extensions in that departure date, mainly because of the factor of getting their equipment moved," he said.

Corporate-wide, officials for Akebono have said they will shut down or sell six factories and eliminate about 3,000 jobs, or 30% of the global staff, under a restructuring plan presented to creditors.

After entering the market in the 1980s, Akebono had at one point run four American plants, including the Clarksville location purchased from Germany’s Bosch. Already pressured by mounting labor and transportation costs, according to the company, it lost orders from GM and ended up filing for an out-of-court rehabilitation process in January 2019.

“It will take at least three to five years to resurrect the American operations,” Akebono Chairman and President Hisataka Nobumoto had said at the outset of the company's downsizing. “We need to transform into a production structure that corresponds to our scale."

The Clarksville facility has been producing automotive disc brake calipers, disc rotors, drum brakes and corner modules.

The Clarksville and Columbia, South Carolina, closures are part of the process of consolidating to a single plant manufacturing structure in the U.S. and improving productivity.

Reach Jimmy Settle at jimmysettle@theleafchronicle.com or 931-245-0247. To support his work, sign up for a digital subscription to TheLeafChronicle.com.