Rosti opened its second Chinese plant yesterday in an official ceremony involving customers, partners and government officials.
Located in Suzhou near Shanghai, the new Rosti Integrated Manufacturing Solutions (IMS) plant is located in Suzhou several kilometres from its Rosti Technical Plastics plant, which was first established in 2002 and now concentrates on automotive applications. Rosti IMS will focus on business machine applications.
Although there are 20 Demag moulding machines with clamping forces in the 35-800 tonne range in each of the two plants, with a Chinese-made 60-tonne Demag due for delivery in June to the Rosti IMS site, Rosti’s regional sales director China, Karl Stillmann told PRW.com: “We don’t want people to think that we are a moulder, as we also buy in plastics parts.”
Stillmann explained that low-cost machines are driving down machine rates well below what can often be achieved on Rosti’s own machines. Items such as the latest version note counting machine for one of its international customers is now a purely contract manufacturing operation with no Rosti mouldings used any more and most cost savings have been achieved through local component sourcing.
According to Stillmann, this approach makes Rosti IMS “like a baby Flextronics – big enough to cope, small enough to care.”
Commenting on the annual USD42.7m sales achieved by the Chinese sites, Rosti Group ceo Stig Hoffmeyer confirmed the statement at the Suzhou opening ceremony by Bent Carlsen, chairman of parent company A.P. Møller Mærsk, that sales from Suzhou “have potential to double in line with Rosti’s plan for 2010” and added that the plan applies to the entire group results, for which sales are presently around USD200m, covering production in 11 sites, also including those in The Netherlands, Poland, Scotland, Mexico and the USA.
