MOSCOW (MRC) -- Teijin Ltd. is expanding its footprint in Europe with Teijin Automotive Center Europe GmbH, a new base in Wuppertal, Germany, that will house technical functions for the company’s automotive composites business, reported PlasticsNews.
Teijin Ltd. is expanding its footprint in Europe with Teijin Automotive Center Europe GmbH (TACE), a new base in Wuppertal, Germany, that will house technical functions for the company's automotive composites business.
The Japanese materials firm said Jan. 28 that the German operation will handle concept, designing, prototyping, evaluations, marketing and technical research for next-generation automotive components.The Wuppertal site will be up and running in February.
With TACE, Teijin said it will allow the company to establish a stronger platform for collaboration within the group's European automotive composites business. More specifically, TACE will explore and research opportunities for new technologies, as well as mergers and acquisitions, in an effort to accelerate joint development with European automakers and respond to demands for design freedom, productivity, cost efficiency, weight reduction and strength.
In the past few years, Teijin has been making strategic moves in Europe as it targets sales of approximately 1.7 billion euros (EUR1.9 billion) within its automotive composites business by 2030. This includes the acquisition last year of Benet Automotive sro., a Tier 1 supplier of composite components with three facilities in the Czech Republic and one in Germany. In 2018, Teijin acquired Portugal's Inapal Plasticos SA, another automotive composites supplier.
Teijin-owned Continental Structural Plastics Inc. of Auburn Hills, Mich., is also further tapping into Europe. The composites supplier's French operation is opening a new sheet molding compound plant.
In addition, Teijin is pursuing opportunities for other locations for its automotive composites business in the United States and China. The strategy is part of the company's response to the automotive industry's "ongoing shift toward connected, autonomous, shared and electric automobiles" and the growing need for more lightweight, multifunctional and multimaterial designs, the news release said.
As MRC wrote before, in late 2015, Japan's Teijin shut down its polycarbonate (PC) resin plant in Singapore by end 2015 and put the industrial facility on Jurong Island up for sale through an expression of interes. The plan to shutter was part of the company's restructuring exercise of its loss-making businesses. Hurt particularly by high energy costs, the Singapore plant, which began operations in October 1999, had also been beaten by low-cost China rivals. It had four production lines. One production line was shut down in October, 2014, and another in May, 2015. The remaining two were shut by late 2015. Teijin scaled back on its production of commoditised products under its restructuring exercise, and moved its production of PC resin to its subsidiary in China and to its plant in Matsuyama in Japan, which it considers especially suited to the development of high-performance products, the company said then.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PC consumption (excluding imports and exports to/from Belarus) totalled 78,500 tonnes in 2019, up by 15% year on year (68,100 tonnes a year earlier).
Teijin is a technology-driven global group offering advanced solutions in the areas of sustainable transportation, information and electronics, safety and protection, environment and energy, and healthcare. Its main fields of operation are high-performance fibers such as aramid, carbon fibers & composites, healthcare, films, resin & plastic processing, polyester fibers, products converting and IT. The group has some 150 companies and around 17,000 employees spread out over 20 countries worldwide.
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