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A road in the United States has been named after a Nottinghamshire family which has created hundreds of jobs with a new factory.

The Puri family - which owns the Purico group that runs a global manufacturing empire from a small Nottingham office - officially unveiled a £55m plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, this week.

To mark the occasion, American politicians renamed a road next to the site as Puri Drive.

Supplying external car parts such as chrome flashings and grilles to the likes of Mercedes-Benz, the company’s factory – which operates under the Bolta US subsidiary – employs about 200 people and has capacity for 320 staff. Future growth is anticipated beyond that.

Nat Puri, who founded the company in 1983, also has a roundabout named after him in Germany after the firm opened its first automotive plant near Nuremburg, known as Bolta Werke.

He said: “It’s very kind of them. There’s an Indian name in Germany, and now there’s one in the USA, so that pleases me.

“If you are going to do the right thing, you don’t need to worry about what might happen – you just need to work hard and do your best every day.

“We sell quality. We’re not the cheapest but our clients, such as Mercedes, want the highest quality.

“We will slowly find more customers here because BMW and Nissan are also based nearby.

“There’s a lot of opportunities to do more from here because it’s a very big market – the US makes 15 million cars every year.”

Purico, which employs about 3,500 people and has a turnover exceeding £400m, is headquartered in Huntingdon Street.

The company’s operations also include manufacturing bottles for weed killers and insecticide, as well as air filtration paper for coffee and tea. It also owns care homes, hotels and other properties, and has a steel structures arm.

In the automotive business, it now has three sites – Germany, Mexico and the USA.

Political and business leaders from around Alabama attended the grand opening ceremony on Friday (July 21) alongside senior employees from Germany and Mexico.

US representative for Alabama, Congressman Robert Aderholt, said the Tuscaloosa factory was a mid-sized facility in the area that would further boost a local economy that relies heavily upon a Mercedes-Benz plant that was opened nearby 20 years ago and employs 4,000 people.

He said: “Tuscaloosa is one of the major cities but it’s still one of those places where 350 jobs makes a big difference, so I’m delighted the company has decided to set up a factory here.”

Mayor of Tuscaloosa, Walter Maddox, said in a speech: “Purico has provided an opportunity for a better life, to purchase a home, send kids to college.”

Greg Canfield, Secretary of Commerce for the State of Alabama, said about 40,000 residents in Alabama were now employed in the automotive sector.

“As a world leader in the sector, Bolta has established itself as a pre-eminent supplier,” he said.

“For the Purico group, it’s been a journey of more than 30 years of growth, opportunity and spectacular success. It doesn’t happen without a lot of work.”

Purico chairman Anil Puri added: “One of the biggest challenges in Germany and Mexico is that we haven’t had enough capacity so this time, through the support of the USA, we’ve bought a decent parcel of land that will hopefully keep us occupied for the next 20 years.”

“I visualise that this site will employ a lot more people as there is a lot of engineering talent here. We believe it will contribute a little bit in helping to develop the local economy.”