Daimler to open office in Baghdad

Baghdad: Daimler AG, the world's largest truckmaker, plans to open an office in Baghdad by the end of the year because it's confident that Iraq is stabilizing after the US-led war to remove President Saddam Hussein from power.

"We know that the Iraqi government will welcome this move as a sign of confidence in the country's advancing normalization," Daimler spokeswoman Ursula Mertzig-Stein said on Wednesday in a telephone interview.

The office is not meant to directly generate sales in Iraq and Daimler has no forecast for when it might peddle cars and trucks in the country, Mertzig-Stein said.

The opening of the office will nonetheless be a victory for Iraqi and US officials pushing to attract foreign investment to the war- ravaged country, the Wall Street Journal reported.

"Daimler intends to establish a corporate representative office in Baghdad," Mertzig-Stein said in the Bloomberg interview.

In addition to being the world leader in trucks, Stuttgart-based Daimler is the second-largest maker of luxury cars, after German competitor Bayerische Motoren Werke AG.