Jessica Mendoza

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Jessica Mendoza.

It's Tuesday, February 24th.

Coming up on the show, how one Chinese company is disrupting American manufacturing in America's heartland.

Vitro is the largest glassmaker in North America.

It's headquartered in Mexico, but it has factories everywhere, from Pennsylvania to Kentucky.

And its auto glass factory in Crestline, Ohio, has been a mainstay in the local economy for decades, one of the last strongholds of the manufacturing era.

Gavin says walking into Vitro's plant is like going back in time.

For years, vitro was the main glassmaking game in the area.

But in 2016, that started to change.

Fuyao took over a former General Motors plant and turned it into a glass factory.

And how did the community react to Fuyao coming to town?

The new factory was also welcomed by politicians from both parties, like Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and Ohio's then-governor, Republican John Kasich.

In the years that followed, Fuyao appeared to thrive.

The company ate up market share in the local glass industry, selling products at much lower prices than its competitors, including Vitro.

The plant manager at the Vitro factory in Crestline said that they saw their volume drop by 50% in the past seven years.

Vitro executives told Gavin they started to notice some bigger problems with Fuyao almost from the get-go.

After five years of investigating, DHS eventually raided the Fuyao plant in 2024.

A civil complaint filed by federal authorities last year alleges that Fuyao's Chinese business funneled $126 million to a web of dozens of commercial enterprises in Ohio.

A Fuyao spokeswoman said all employees at Fuyao were authorized to work in the U.S.