Tongtai to Build Factory Near Kaohsiung Headquarters

Tongtai Machine & Tool Co., Ltd. has decided to build a factory near its headquarters in Kaohsung, southern Taiwan, and train more specialists as part of its expansion plan to further grow in the machine-tool market, in which the company made an estimated 27% year-on-year revenue increase in the first five months this year.

The new factory is designed to build horizontal machining centers and horizontal boring machines on 66,000 square meters of land.

Company chairman, J.H. Yen, attributes the company's growth mostly to its success in differentiating products from competitors' and diversifying product lines, noting that by doing so the company achieved revenue growth last year despite Taiwan's machine-tool industry as  a whole posting an average 20% decrease from the previous year.

The company made NT$370 million (US$12.3 million) in consolidated after-tax net income, or NT$1.23 per share, last year, with some  NT$2 billion (US$66.6 million) in undelivered orders and order books already filled throughout this September.

The company aims to be among the world's top-20 machine-tool groups by 2020 with its subsidiaries, for which the company and its subsidiaries will target promoting sales to manufacturers of automotive parts and aircraft components.

Yen said that business for car-parts machine tools is quite promising since such parts come in wide-ranging specifications and types, for which China's parts makers demand machines to efficiently boost output.

For the market of aircraft machine tools, he believes that the market will remain buoyant at least 30 years. The company has shipped heavy-duty five-axis machining centers to the Taiwanese airplane builder Aerospace Industrial Development Corp. (AIDC), Singapore Airlines, and China's Xi'an Aero Engine Corp. to make such machines the company's top earner in the aircraft machine-tool market.

Tongtai has recently signed a pact to source the controllers for aircraft machine tools from the Siemens' machine-tool business group. (KL)