My connection says that New Holland is talking about trying to make their tractors from the ground up in the near future (likely they'll still buy an engine) so that'll be interesting. Maybe the LS & Shibaura contract is just a stop-gap until they get up and running.
I cant see them (that is any brand not currently building their own) going back into production as long as they can get a machine fabricated by someone else and to the quality they expect. It would cost them too much to do it AND the market share isn't there for everyone to make their own. All the small tractor makers have more capacity than they can sell under their own brand so they farm our the excess capacity to the other guys and just buy some different color paint. To be competitive, the factory would have to be someplace where labor is cheap so the obvious locations would be something like the Shibaura, LS, Yanmar, Mahindra etc are located which wouldn't gain them anything and maybe cause the prices to be much higher than they can currently sell them for which in turn would give the Shibaura, LS, Yanmar, Mahindra guys an even bigger share of the market without them having to invest any money.
