Mosa Successfully Develops Automotive Airbag Gas Inflators

Taipei, Dec. 27, 2010 (CENS)--Mosa Industrial Corp. of Taiwan recently claimed that it has successfully developed a gas inflator unit, a key part in automotive airbag system, making the company one of the very few suppliers of such a product.

The company aims to produce about two million airbag gas inflators in 2011 for sales to o local automakers such as China Motor Corp., Yulon Motor Co., and Luxgen Motor Co., Ltd. as well as carmakers in mainland China.

Mosa is a reinvested affiliate of local Yulon Group, the largest automobile-manufacturing conglomerate in Taiwan that owns a 25% stake in the affiliate. The firm is also the world's second-largest maker of high-pressure metal-canister and accessories. Other major shareholders in Mosa include Euroc Venture Capital Corp., Industrial Bank of Taiwan etc.

Charles Wang, Mosa's president, claimed that his company has poured a total of NT$2 billion (US$66.7 million) into plant expansion in Central Taiwan Science Park (CTSP)'s Huwei Base. As parts of the expansion project, an agent facility is scheduled to be completed in July 2011 and the facility would be further expanded in the future. In 2014, Mosa's annual capacity of airbag gas inflators is projected at 12 million sets.

Besides the aggressive expansion project at its CTSP campus, Wang said, Mosa is also trying to find an ideal place to site an assembly facility in an automobile production citadel in northeast China so as to directly tap into the big automobile market.

Industry sources said that the global demand for automotive airbags is about 250 million units, which grows at an annual rate of 25%. The gas inflator is one of the most important key parts of airbags, and the market has long been dominated by American, European, and Japanese big names such as TRW, TAKA, Dacel etc.

Wang claimed that China, the largest automobile market in the world with about 17 million cars sold in 2010, is scheduled to enlist the airbag as a standard equipment of new cars in 2012. So Mosa is eyeing the huge business opportunities, about 50 million airbags per year, in the Chinese market.