Company News

Expanding to meet demand
Canadian extrusion systems supplier, Macro Engineering & Technology has expanded its production facility by 50% to meet the growth that followed record-breaking sales reported early this year. The new facility is a neighbouring building to Macro’s main plant in Mississauga. “The main reason for the expansion was to create additional floor space to assemble and test our extrusion lines,” states John Shimmell, Macro’s Operation Manager. “The expansion also allowed us to free up space in our main plant for quicker manufacture of our speciality retrofit components, such as dies and air rings, which are also in high demand this year. In fact, air ring production is up 300% from previous years.”

By 2010, BASF will have a new plant for making PU automotive spring aids at its existing site in Shanghai, China. This will be its third plant in Asia, adding on to a similar plant in Nansha, also in China, and Shinshiro in Japan. The new plant will produce Cellasto spring aids for 5 million vehicles/year and together with the other two will enable BASF to supply spring aids to the Asia Pacific region. Cellasto spring aids are made of cellular PU elastomers to damp vibrations and reduce noise level. Around 160 million Cellasto components are manufactured a year at the six BASF sites worldwide.

Meanwhile, Malaysian chemical company Titan Chemicals has set up a new subsidiary in Dubai to expand its business to the Middle East. Besides Malaysia, Titan has offices in Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong and in major cities in China. As a market leader in Malaysia, it offers PE and PP products and had a 38% share in the polyolefins sales volume in 2007. In Indonesia, it has a 30% share in the LLDPE and HDPE markets.