Cover Story
Apr 1st, 2008                                Print this article

Notable Processors 2008

By Robert Colvin

Passion, for this industry and for the success of their businesses: that passion proves the common link between the members of our very diverse class of Notable Processors for 2008. This year’s assemblage represents all manner of plastics processes, serving markets as diverse as automotive, food packaging, and aquaculture supplies. We trust you will enjoy reading about your peers and competitors, and perhaps even be inspired by them.

Nicholas Barakat & Joe Barenberg Eduardo Castro Floyd Coates Murray Fenton Haydn Forward Jeff Gage Keith Giacchino Boon-King Goh Larry Goode Axel and Boris Greiner Pranay Kothari Ulrich Kremer Robert Mayr Nick Noble Onur Pişan Naum & Maya Royberg Marcia Sampson Sumant Singhal Breck Speed Mike Springer

Nicholas Barakat & Joe Barenberg

Betting big on amorphous polyethylene terephthalate (APET) is sheet extruder Octal Holding & Co., based near a port in Oman and, if all goes according to plan, the world’s largest APET sheet supplier in the next few months. This month the firm’s executives, CEO Nicholas Barakat (in photo, left), and COO Joe Barenberg, will attend the interpack exhibition in Düsseldorf, Germany to make their case as the premier supplier of APET sheet for thermoformers.

This year the men and their team say they will bring a new $300 million PET resin supply/APET sheet-extrusion complex online, giving the processor an additional 300,000 tonnes/yr of APET sheet capacity to add to the 30,000-tonnes/yr of current capacity.

Octal is located just 500m from Salalah Port in Oman, and Barakat says its deliveries from there can reach almost any port within 12-18 days. Even to a current U.S. customer 1000 miles inland, deliveries take just 20-23 days. The executives reckon they will supply about 20% of the world market for APET sheet.

Octal went from start to star quickly; the firm first started operations in late 2006 with 20,000 tonnes/yr of APET sheet capacity and last year added an additional 10,000-tonnes/yr capacity. Two private equity firms in the U.S. invested in Octal: Chemlink Capital, of which Barakat is president, and Pound Capital. Several smaller, Oman-based investors also fund Octal but the majority of the investment comes from Chemlink and Pound.

Barenberg and Barakat met while employed at International Paper in that firm’s packaging division. “We’re emulating the paper industry’s efficiency,” says Barakat, noting that until now the APET sheet market has been dominated by no player, leaving a number of regional powers but none large enough to serve the needs of global thermoforming processors or their OEM customers.

Octal’s big bet is that the major packaging megatrend—convenience packaging—will continue. “You can’t stop the tide; people want convenience,” noted Barenberg. “There’s been a perception that PET has been too expensive in the past,” admits Barakat, but says his firm will change that.

Eduardo Castro

Thirty-one years ago directors of the Tehmco Enterprise Group (Renca/Santi-ago, Chile) decided that specialization and innovation were the answers to its future. The company, originally a processor of plastics toys and household goods, decided to target plastic pipes for mining, potable water, drainage, and submarine markets.

Today the processor has a staff of more than 200, churning out 30,000 tonnes/yr of pipe with diameters ranging from 16-2000 mm, says Eduardo Castro, technical director at the company. With two plants housing 25 extrusion lines, mainly from German equipment producer Battenfeld (Bad Oeynhausen), the company, which earned $70 million in annual sales last year, is one of the top Latin American pipe processors.

“Tehmco’s history has been linked to innovation, in terms of new product developments designed for specific market needs as well as through the use of the latest production technology available,” says Castro. The company today processes mainly PE100 high-density polyethylene pipe, since he says the price difference between PE 80 and PE100 resin now overlaps so there is little cost difference. “The price increases [of resin] experienced in the last years have mainly had the effect of requiring, on our part, increased need for working capital,” he says. Whenever possible the company tries to pass on these increases via higher prices of its products.

But Castro says that despite price hikes in all building and construction raw materials, the plastic pipe market in Chile has nonetheless experienced continuous growth. In particular, the use of polyethylene pipes at the expense of vinyl, ductile iron, or steel has helped boost the market. Cement pipes are not permitted in Chile.

However Castro says the company still faces competition from local and Latin American processors extruding pipes up to 1200-mm diameter, as well as from Canada and the U.S. for larger sizes. But targeting project-related markets, such as the copper and molybdenum compounds mining industries, for super-sized PE100 pipes, has helped propel the processor to its highest growth rates so far.

Castro says that finding qualified extrusion equipment operators in Chile is tough, and therefore the company has had to undertake its own training program both in its home market and abroad.

Floyd Coates

It’s not often one visits a booth at a trade show and receives a free book written by the owner of the company, but that’s the case at American Plastic Molding Corp. (APMC); Floyd Coates, owner and president, wrote and published “Our Toilets Are Not for Customers.” The book is an interesting take on Coates’ philosophy on life and business. “The book helps us to communicate our company moral values to help customers choose the type of molder they want,” says Coates. “It is not just plastic parts, it’s attitude.”

APMC (Scottsburg, IN) was founded by Coates in 1971. He learned the plastics business from his father, who, he says, taught him that to be a success, “We had to provide superior quality and value to our customers.” That, he adds, is what makes his company successful and keeps APMC’s customers—more than 200 of them—coming back.

Coates learned a lot about business by paying attention to others. In November 1974, he was in a store looking for new lighting fixtures for his home, damaged by a tornado a few months before. He and his wife had settled on $1700 worth of lighting fixtures, about half of what they needed, but were still shopping. Coates heard “nature’s call” and asked a clerk about a restroom in the store. “Our toilets are not for customers,” she pronounced, giving him directions to a restaurant down the street. Coates promptly interrupted his shopping trip, canceled his order, left the store and found a restroom. “Some 20 years later, I did go back,” he writes. “They now have, in this multimillion-dollar store, toilets for their customers. I like it when people learn to see things from the customer’s point of view.”

Coates’ customer focus knows no bounds. APMC offers full-day Plastic Part Design seminars at no charge to educate current and prospective customers in all aspects of part design, mold design, material selection, and cost reduction. Upcoming seminars are scheduled for August 21 and November 20 of 2008. Besides plant tours, Coates even offers no-charge engineering consultations by appointment before and after the seminars.

Today, the company occupies 110,000 ft² with 36 injection molding machines ranging from 5 to 725 tons, and employs 130 people. Secondary operations include hot stamping, ultrasonic welding, and pad printing. And at American Plastic Molding, their toilets are for customers!

Murray Fenton

A 30% appreciation against the U.S. dollar is bad news for a processor whose major market is North America. Nevertheless, New Zealand’s Adept Ltd. (Auckland) is fighting these currency constraints with innovation as it strives to add value to its business. Heading this strategy is Adept Medical, a subsidiary that started operations in 2007 with a focus on otorhinolaryngology (ear, nose, and throat) markets.

“Product ownership or a partnership with the developing company is important in the medical sector,” says Adept Managing Director Murray Fenton. “This is how we can derive value.”

Fenton also emphasizes the need to thoroughly research the patent literature to ensure the product is indeed a new idea, and for keeping development projects under wrap. “Medical products have an extended gestation period and you don’t want potential competitors sniffing them out before they can be patented,” he notes.

As part of a charity project, Adept recently designed a US$6 reusable IV flow controller that does not require a pump for patients in the developing world. Relatively untrained operators can achieve an accuracy and precision similar to the $2000 alternative used in the developed world. The Acuset IV Flow Controller was a finalist in the 2008 Saatchi & Saatchi Award For World Changing Ideas.

Adept’s core business is still its meat hygiene business, where it molds acetal and PBT beef and lamb clips and plugs, to the tune of 110 million per year. As an extension to this, it recently worked on a project with a local developer for a controlled-environment, long-term meat storage system. The scope of the project was eventually extended to include meat shipping containers as well, thereby negating the need for supermarkets to employ butchers. The system has been rolled out in New Zealand, with Australia to follow.

Haydn Forward

Haydn Forward’s first exposure to plastics was about 25 years ago when compression molded fiber-reinforced plastics (FRP) began replacing sheet metal for electrical equipment enclosures, he recalls. Following six years in the FRP business, he joined Specialty Manufacturing Inc. (SMI), a heavy-gauge pressure former in San Diego, CA. Today, Forward is co-owner and vice president of SMI, which focuses on processing attractive, tight-tolerance enclosures for dental and medical equipment. “This is certainly a dynamic industry in which we continue to develop new applications,” says Forward. “This success comes out of Specialty Manufacturing’s eagerness to discuss the needs of OEMs through industrial designers, and to educate them in the capabilities of thermoforming—or pressure forming. This is specifically true for larger parts or for moderate-volume components.”

SMI operates nine pressure formers and six CNC 5-axis routers in about 50,000 ft² of space at two facilities, and employs 50. “Our goal is to increase output by using automation and implementing some lean practices to stay at 50 employees, including an engineering staff of three,” he says.

Forward remains excited about the business and is amazed at the technological advances he has seen even in just the past five years, including new and creative design approaches, plus new equipment to help processors be more productive and efficient. “It’s this industry’s equipment manufacturers that allow us to apply the extremely high pressure needed on the back of the sheet to make these very crisp, tight-tolerance components that have become our trademark at SMI, and the advancements in materials that lend themselves to new products,” he says.

Forward is active with the SPE’s thermoforming division, and spent three years on its board of directors. He served as the parts competition chairman for last year’s convention, which “was very exciting simply because it showcases the advances the industry has made.” Last year Forward asked firms that traditionally haven’t entered parts in the competition to participate. “We were very pleased; 40% of the entries came from non-SPE members. That improved the overall exposure of the parts entered and gave us a hint that the industry is seeing the importance and the prestige of the competition,” he says.

SMI has won its fair share of awards for parts as well, including 10 over the past nine years. “I’ll be chairing the parts competition again this year, and we’re looking forward to seeing a still higher level of competition,” Forward says.

Jeff Gage

From winning a national green building design award in 1984 to integrating post-consumer recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) into its products in 1989, thermoformer and sheet extruder Gage Industries was green before there was green in it. Jeff Gage, CEO Gage Industries (Lake Oswego, OR), and son of founder Ripley Gage, has taken the sustainable commitment beyond the shop floor, co-authoring the Oregon Resource Trust Fund Bill, which has become a national model for legislative means to finance recycling operations and land-conservation efforts.

“I was a just-say-no guy,” Gage says, describing his previous stance on any regulation, “fighting bans and things like that, until I decided that I wanted to do something that was positive. [The bill] treats paper and plastics and metal and glass equally.”

Gage’s stance is informed by an entire professional career in plastics, starting at his father’s company while he was still in high school in 1966, working on its payroll. Summers in college were spent in the new sheet-extrusion business, and after graduation in 1969, he started full time. When his parents retired in 1992, he took over and grew Gage from $3 to $47 million sales.

Currently Gage has 160 employees, 120,000 ft² of manufacturing, and five sheet lines. The company also operates a packaging-thermoforming business, focusing on PET for oven-ready containers.

Going forward, the company sees its early embrace of sustainability moving through the industry at large. “I’ve always been a believer in trying to do positive things,” Gage says, “and I think that’s really the direction the plastics industry is trying to go in. People are trying to figure out ways of making their products and their processes more sustainable.”

Keith Giacchino

Succession planning for family-owned businesses can be complicated, but for Plastics Design & Manufacturing (PDM; Englewood, CO) it was fairly clear cut. “[Succession talk] started 10 years ago with, ’What are we going to do with this family business,’” explains Keith Giacchino, president. “One brother had left town, the other brother wanted out, and my dad was retirement age, so I’m the crazy one, I guess. I stepped up to the bar and said, ’OK.’”

Imprudent or not, hindsight looks favorably on Giacchino’s decision, with PDM named to Inc. 5000’s list of the fastest growing private businesses, with revenue up 51.1% last year. What his father had started as a custom thermoforming business in 1976 has grown to include a substantial proprietary business, including extruded high-density polyethylene (HDPE) fencing (see MPW April 2004 Modern Executive for initial report) and a consumer parking product.

Giacchino, who’s been with PDM for 22 years, spending time on everything from sweeping floors to purchasing and running its 15 vacuum-forming and six extrusion lines, admits the transition wasn’t entirely smooth.

“2000, 2001, 2002…those were hard times, oh my God,” Giacchino remembers. “The whole dot-com crash, 9/11—our business fell by almost 50%. So from 2001 to present day, it’s been an uphill climb just to get back to where we were.”

At its lowest point, PDM’s staff fell 70% to 28, but today the company’s at 57 and making the same amount of money it brought in with 80 employees, which explains a net-profit explosion of 75%. “Those hard times really get you lean and mean. They make you restructure what you’re doing and reorganize the way you’re doing things.” Right now, the custom/proprietary split is 85:15, but Giacchino’s three-year plan is to shift that to 50:50. “It’s been a good run,” Giacchino says. “I’m excited for what will happen in the next five years.”

Boon-King Goh

Guppy Plastic Industries was born of the need of the Gombak Fish Farm for quality plastic aquarium equipment. Frustrated by a lack of suitable fish-rearing paraphernalia for what was a rapidly expanding aquaculture venture, founders K.G. Ng and C.P. Goh set up the processing company in 1970, and since then it has diversified and grown into one of Malaysia’s leading molders, serving markets as diverse as automotive, furniture, pet-care products, office equipment, semiconductor packaging, and disposable cutlery.

General Manager Boon-King Goh says this diversity is an advantage in that it reduces exposure to any single sector, but it is a challenge to manage such a diversified product portfolio. “You need to segment your businesses into individual core units in order to have better control and keep abreast of product and market requirements from the individual sectors,” he notes. “For example, disposable cutlery requires HACCP certification, whereas in the automotive industry you need TS16949 certification.” Despite this segmentation, individual core units can be switched quickly from one portfolio to the other if required, because Guppy’s staff is trained across multiple portfolios through periodic job rotation.

Guppy’s geographical spread is as diverse as its portfolio. “We export to 30 countries, and our customers include a major worldwide fast food chain for disposable cutlery, and Hagen (Montreal, QC) for pet supplies.” Guppy also started molding medical parts for a U.S.-based electronic manufacturing services company in 2006, and plans to upgrade from a semi-cleanroom to a full cleanroom facility shortly. It also opened a U.S. sales office in California in 2006 to better support and expand its business there.

Guppy’s China facility in Nantong molds cutlery and will be expanded in the future and used as a hub for low-cost and labor-intensive products. It will also serve as a base for any of the company’s current clients who move production to China.

Guppy also designs and markets its own range of housewares, aquariums, and cutlery, and is active in original design manufacturer on behalf of its customers. “We plan to expand the ODM sector from 5% to 10% of total sales,” says Goh.

Larry Goode

A history major with a minor in education, Larry Goode, CEO of seal and gasket supplier RT/Dygert International (Edina, MN), first set out as an educator. “I taught high school for a couple years,” Goode recalls, “and two years was enough to convince me that I wanted to move on. It was a great job, and there were wonderful personal rewards, but I’ll tell you, I’ve never voted down a school-funding bill since, because teachers are not paid enough for what they put up with.”

In 2008, RT/Dygert celebrates its 50th anniversary, and last year marked 20 years of ownership by Goode. When he purchased the company, annual sales were $1 million, “pretty much break even,” and the business employed six with one site and most of its customers within 150 miles. Today, sales top $20 million, the company has 50 employees—and with a location in Chicago, garnered via the 2004 acquisition of RT Enterprises, and the March 2005 opening of a wholly owned foreign enterprise in China, RT/Dygert now has three sites with business generated globally.

“If somebody said to me five years ago that we would have a branch office in Chicago and a facility in China,” Goode says, “I would have said you’re smoking something funny.” Given Goode’s introduction to the company, starting in 1974 on the factory floor before moving into sales, his surprise in understandable. Goode left the company in 1979, but kept in touch with his boss and the owner of then-ES Dygert, with the connection eventually leading him to bid on the firm in 1986 when it went up for sale. Still today, his time at the front of the classroom informs his management style, commenting on what remains relevant. “The role of preparation,” Goode says. “Lesson plans are not terribly different from developing business plans.

Axel and Boris Greiner

With sales exceeding $1.1 billion, the Greiner Group is a major player in the world of plastics packaging, and there is hardly a plastics processing method—extrusion, blowmolding, thermoforming, and injection molding—of which the firm does not make use. It also is one of Europe’s largest processors of soft polyurethane foam.

The firm’s beginnings, though, were more humble, and date back to 1868, when the Greiner family founded a grocery and ironmongery in Germany. Ten years later Greiner started with cork manufacturing, and in 1899 founded its first associated company in Austria. In the 1950s and 1960s, PU foam, plastic packaging, Petri dishes, and other products for laboratories expanded the product range. To this day, fully 43% of Greiner’s plastics processing is done in Austria, with another 18% in Germany.

The company remains 100% family owned and employs more than 8000 at 92 processing facilities. Since 1999 all company units have operated as individual, independent undertakings, headed by two holding companies, Greiner Holding and Greiner Bio-One International. Leadership is handled by the co-Chairmen, Axel and Boris Greiner.

The company is actively tackling two of the toughest issues facing plastics processors. On the first, ensuring it can recruit and maintain top-notch employees, the firm began its own MBA-style training program, called the Greiner Academy, where Greiner’s entry- and mid-level managers take courses in financial management, marketing, leadership, and other relevant topics. Last year the Academy awarded its 300th diploma.

On the shop floor, Greiner is just as active. Not satisfied with a typical apprenticeship program, the Group added elements of the Montessori school to its agenda, emphasizing the role of mentors for new employees but also giving the apprentices the opportunity to learn by doing. Employees also get their say at Group subsidiary Greiner Tool.Tec, manufacturer of extrusion tooling, where since 2002, an employee group GLL (Gesund Laenger Leben; Live longer, healthier) works to optimize not only the employees’ workplace but also the work conditions, following the maxim that healthy employees are better employees.

On the second tough issue—sustainability—the Greiner family has put emphasis on its facilities’ ability to be models of low energy use. At one of its most recent acquisitions, Ireland’s Wilsanco Plastics, Greiner built a new warehouse with pipes installed in the floor, which, in the future, will be used to draw heat from processing machinery into the ground, one of a number of moves the firm estimates will help it save more than 50% of the energy it uses to cool its machines.

Pranay Kothari

When the world’s fourth-largest biaxially oriented polyester (BOPET) processor decided to offer greater value to its customers, it set out to provide a one-stop-shop for BOPET, cast polypropylene (CPP), and a new product on its roster, BOPP. To do that, says company CEO/Executive Director Pranay Kothari of Polyplex (Gautam Budh Nagar, India), it needed to invest in what is said to be the world’s most powerful BOPP line to date—a 8.7m-wide line with a net output of 6300 kg/hr running at more than 500 m/min. The 3-layer coextrusion line from Germany’s Brückner Maschinenbau, equipped with a twin-screw extrusion system from KraussMaffei Berstorff, is located at the company’s Khatima, India site and targets specialty packaging films, Kothari says.

Despite a growing domestic market, Polyplex finds most of its output shipped around the world. More than 46% is exported to Asia, 34% to Europe, and 14% to the Americas. Kothari says the company wisely decided to backward integrate manufacture of its own PET chips starting in 1997, and has since expanded capacity. “[This] definitely has given us distinct advantages over other players by permitting us to have consistent and assured supply of raw material and the ability to produce different grades of resin to make tailor-made films,” he says. To produce the PET chips, one of the raw materials (mono-ethylene glycol) is extracted from biodegradable materials, letting the firm score points in the environmental arena, too.

Kothari says processing close to film markets is also critical for the company. For that reason, Polyplex established a production plant in Reyong, Thailand in 2003 to help supply Asia/Pacific, and used the same model to start a film extrusion operation in Çorlu, Turkey a year later. Polyplex considered a variety of locations in Western and Eastern Europe before selecting Turkey—despite its high energy costs and (then) uneven power supplies—as the location that most conveniently serves Europe, Asia Minor, Russia, and the CIS countries, he says. Today the processor has a staff of 982 located in India, Thailand, Turkey, and the U.S.

As part of India’s Center for Social Research (CSR), a women’s institution designed to sensitize men and women to gender relations, Polyplex runs a school, considered one of the best in the area, in North India where its plant is located. The company also provides financial aid to the CRS ’Child Rights and You’ movement to benefit underprivileged youth.

Ulrich Kremer

One thing Silver Plastics (Troisdorf, Germany)—a key producer of food packaging based on extruded and thermoformed polypropylene (PP), foamed polystyrene (PS), and, since last year, APET—doesn’t have in its production halls are garlands of garlic to keep the vampires at bay. Instead it relies on an innovative technology, Vampirella, a high-absorption packaging used for meat, fowl, and fish presentation that absorbs blood and juices through micropores in the upper shell and hides them in a layer below. One 73-mm tray can absorb a liquid volume equal to more than three 2-cl glasses.

The design of the packaging prevents liquids from leaking out thanks to a seal around the edge of the tray. The foamed sheet remains clean and attractive, and, says Ulrich Kremer, managing director of Silver Plastics, consequently results in less repackaging. Fresh meat, fish, and poultry retain their appearance for attractive product presentation. Silver Plastics customizes these products for customers’ needs. Once the packaging has been opened and used, the trays are recyclable.

In 1998 Silver Plastics developed and started producing what is said to be the first PP-modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) tray as its second product foothold. The processor, which has been producing food packaging since 1968, operates a modern 70,000m2 production and stock facility, turning out up to 4 million containers/day. Operating seven extruders, including four coextruders from equipment maker Reifenhäuser, Silver Plastics manufactures up to 18,000 tonnes of deep-draw sheet/yr. The company also features 17 thermoforming machines and has an inventory of more than 100 different tools. In early 2003 the company was confronted by a fire resulting when two rolls of foamed PS ignited through static electricity in a storage building, causing €1.2 million in damage to converted packaging but not the building. Thanks to efforts of employees and management, production was shut down for only two days.

Innovation plays a big role in this company’s development of intelligent packaging solutions. Since food is increasingly packed in central locations for delivery to supermarkets, Silver Plastics sees more demand for PP. It permits microwave cooking within the packaging and also, when coextruded with an integrated barrier resin, is the first choice for MAP-enclosed convenience foods, says Kremer.

Robert Mayr

Sometimes an entrepreneur needs to cut ties to the past, and so it was last year as Robert Mayr changed the name of Dr. Reuter Microcell-PU (Osnabruck, Germany) to the more modern, and Anglicized, Polyvanced. The processor’s mission, though, remains the same: supplying high-end polyurethane hoses and tubes for compressed air to a global customer base in a wide variety of industries including automotive. Prior to the name change, the firm was a captive processor for parent firm Festo Group, an automation and controls manufacturer; now Polyvanced, like so many other processors, needs to fight for its customers’ orders. The conditions needed for further expansion and development have been created with an extension of the development center and technical research laboratories in Osnabruck, along with the expansion of its facility at Ceska Lipa in the Czech Republic.

The continuous development of equipment and production processes has put Polyvanced in a prime position to offer its services as a partner for new products. “Whoever is able to deal successfully with this level of complexity has a clear competitive advantage,” says Mayr. The company extrudes some 40 million meters of tubing per year and counts 100 employees in Europe. To improve its odds now that it no longer can rely solely on the business of its parent, the firm recently added a new X-ray measuring system that lets it measure, inline, the wall thickness, eccentricity, outside diameter, and ovality of single-layer and multilayer hoses.

Nick Noble

A process pioneered in the late 1980s by an Australian aviation buff looks set to take the air by storm. Owned and developed by North Coogee, Australia-based Quickstep Technologies, the Quickstep Process is an innovative composite processing technology primarily for working with thermoset resins that removes the need for costly and cumbersome autoclaves.

Just as innovative is Quickstep Technologies’ strategy to popularize its process in the aerospace and automotive industries through centers of excellence and manufacturing joint ventures, according to managing director Nick Noble. Three centers operate outside of Australia—one at the Northwest Composites Centre of the University of Manchester in the UK, a second embedded into aircraft manufacturer EADS’ tech center at Munich, and a third at the National Composites Center in Dayton, OHc, Noble says. The exact details of these centers vary, but essentially they are joint ventures between Quickstep and the other parties that share costs and profits. The Northwest Composites Centre facility, for example, receives government funding matching Quickstep’s contribution, while Quickstep staff man the other two centers.

“The centers work to take the technology to the geographical areas that it targets, namely wherever there is an aerospace or automotive industry,” says Noble. “They are centers for prototyping and trialing.”

Quickstep is planning to be more than just a technology provider—as mentioned, it will also participate in production globally. “We will bring in the technology and know-how, and our partners (bring) the local market expertise and customer base,” says Noble. “If we merely sell technology, people might just put it in the corner and forget about it.” Several joint ventures are currently under discussion. Quickstep’s first commercial production facility is in Fremantle, Australia and it recently started production of a component for light aircraft that should be certified by July.

Onur Pişan

People always have to eat and farmers want to get the most from their fields. Those truisms led plastics processor Verim Plastik (Istanbul, Turkey) to concentrate on a wide range of specialty 3-layer coextruded films for agricultural, horticultural, and some construction applications, says Onur Pişan, general manager of the blown-film processor. The company saw demand for films from the country’s farmers as early as 1966, and started operations then with a single line. Since that time the processor, which registered global sales volume of $60 million last year, has come up with a wide variety of value-added film solutions.

But Pişan says the agricultural film market today is plagued with overcapacity, especially in Asia and Europe. Cheap films with poor properties, especially in developing markets, are flooding the market. If you can’t compete on price, he says, then you have to offer extra value. One key to his company’s success is to send its own team of agricultural engineers directly to the source to find out exactly from farmers, whether in Arizona, Russia, Turkey, or Italy, what the local film needs are, and then to tailor a product for such applications. The fact that the company also runs its own in-house masterbatch production gives Verim Plastik the ability to offer different and better products than the competition, he says.

Verim Plastik produces a range of silage films, banana bags, irrigation pipes, greenhouse web, and grow tunnels with antivirus, antifog, antidust, or infrared effects, as well as geomembranes for agricultural use. Last year the processor, which operates 24 extruders, saw its sales grow 23% over the previous year. “This year we target a 25% increase,” Pişan says. The company has just added a 3-layer blown-film agricultural line from Davis-Standard (Pawcatuck, CT) to its Izmir, Turkey plant.

Pişan says finding an experienced workforce is impossible, therefore the company has to do its own training at all levels. “We try to create an atmosphere of a family where people will feel comfortable enough to freely voice their opinions,” he says. It seems to work since many of the 300 employees have been with Verim Plastik for more than 15 years.

Naum & Maya Royberg

It’s not unusual for a processor to grow out of a firm’s moldmaking operation. That’s how Precision Molded Products developed—from Precision Mold & Tool in San Antonio, TX. The rest of the story: owners Naum and Maya Royberg came to the United States from Russia via Israel in 1978. Naum was a moldmaker by trade. When asked why they chose Texas, Maya said that when they were asked where in the U.S. they wanted to live, she told the immigration agents they liked the weather in Israel and would like to live in a similar place. The immigration agent chose Texas for them.

They came to the U.S. with their five-year-old daughter and $200, and Naum’s moldmaking expertise. He began working part time for himself in his garage, and in 1985 started Precision Mold & Tool. In 1986, he moved the company from his garage to a 1500-ft² building. The company grew, so in 1989, the Roybergs moved to a 5000-ft² facility. Again the company grew.

Since many of the company’s customers were moving to the region around the Texas/Mexico border, the Roybergs opened a plant—Precision Mold & Tool South—in La Feria, TX in 1991 to serve those customers, including OEMs in the medical instrumentation, automotive, consumer electronics, toy, and aerospace industries. In 1993, the company put a mold repair facility, Precision Mold Int’l., in Reynosa, Mexico to serve what was consumer electronics OEM Zenith, which later became LG Electronics.

Precision Mold Int’l. has expanded over the last 15 years, adding more equipment and an assembly area for certain machined products as a value-added service. More than a repair facility, the company is now building very large molds for OEMs in Mexico. In 1994, Precision Mold & Tool in San Antonio moved once again, this time to a 10,000-ft² facility, and purchased larger CNC equipment to handle larger molds.

In 1999, the Roybergs created Precision Molded Products, an injection molding division located in San Antonio in a 22,000-ft² facility, with a total of six Toshiba and Milacron all-electric presses ranging from 55-400 tons. The division also performs a variety of secondary operations and assembly. “It’s basically a turnkey, single-source supplier that focuses on Tier One-supplier support for the automotive industry,” said the Roybergs. “We had a vision of establishing a center of expertise in mold design, mold build, molding, and assembly for the many automotive companies on the border,” says Naum Royberg. “With Toyota and other major manufacturers coming to San Antonio and the Central Texas area, it gave us another opportunity to expand our services into automotive…As a company we are now turning our sights to establishing expertise in Texas as the leader in large-tonnage (over 1000 tons) mold repair service. Due to the changing landscape of the manufacturers coming from the U.S., Japan, and Europe—we have to be proactive in our approach to the market.”

Marcia Sampson

Marcia Sampson’s life has been one of plastics. Her first experience with a molding press was when she had to “feed” the “noisy green machine” in the basement of the family’s home in Littleton, CO. Picking parts from runners was a family project, and if Friday night rolled around and there were still parts to be plucked from runners, Marcia and her teenaged siblings would throw a party so their friends would show up to help and eat.

She and a sister, Dee, purchased Eldon James Corp. from their parents, and in 1996 they bought a new facility on a 5-acre site in Loveland, CO. Eldon James (a company their father named after his two sons, Lyle Eldon and James) processes proprietary fittings and tubing for the food and beverage, medical, and automotive industries. The company operates 10 presses ranging from 85-150 tons.

Under Sampson’s direction, Eldon James has prospered, and over the past two years the company completed some major expansions to its operations. “We bought two existing buildings in Ft. Collins rather than add on to our other facility,” Sampson explains. The expansions include a 7000-ft² facility in a multi-tenant building, where the company put an extrusion lab. The company bought a 13,000-ft² building to expand operations.

“We’re also in downtown Ft. Collins as part of a redevelopment effort, in a brand new structure—a six-story, mixed-use building,” Sampson says. “We have a 10,000-ft² cleanroom manufacturing facility on one floor and a sales office on another. We purchased five Nissei all-electric molding machines [44-65 tons] and have only two people running that production. We’re bringing in an extruder in April to extrude our tubing, which we cut to length, then assemble with our fittings and either ship to the customers or send for sterilization before shipping to customers.”

History repeats itself. Sampson and her husband, Bill, live in a loft condominium on the top floor of the same building that houses the cleanroom operations. “We go down to the cleanroom molding facility at night to check the machines and change out the bins. I’ve even been known to sneak down there in my robe and slippers,” she says, laughing at the irony of it all.

But the company’s growth is no laughing matter. “We had 25% growth last year even with all our expansion,” Sampson says. “We’re feeling really good about things, and grateful every day that we have a proprietary product line and good customers that continue to call us and order products.”

Sumant Singhal

For a company that only commenced biaxially oriented polypropylene (BOPP) film manufacture in March 2003, Jindal Poly Films (New Delhi, India) has not wasted any time in becoming an industry leader. Starting off with a 13,000-tonne/yr Brückner line, Jindal has added equipment on a regular basis, the latest being two 8.7m Lindauer Dornier lines, each capable of outputs of 6 tonnes/hr each, and speeds of 500 m/min. Once these lines are delivered in September this year, Jindal’s capacity will be 180,000 tonnes/yr, according to Jindal director and COO Sumant Singhal, which will rank Jindal in the top five globally. And it won’t stop there: Singhal says 45,000 tonnes/yr more will be added by 2010.

Jindal has its origins in polyester yarn, which it started to manufacture in 1985. It diversified into BOPET film with a single 12,000-tonnes/yr line in 1996 and currently has 86,000 tonnes/yr of capacity, also ranking it fifth globally, and 25,000 tonnes/yr more will be added by 2010. Jindal also makes its own polyester chips at a 100,000-tonnes/yr plant, to be expanded by 25,000 tonnes/yr in 2010.

Value addition is also an important part of Jindal’s business strategy, as evidenced by its metallizing and coating facilities. Investment is also being made to boost metallizing capacity this year.

Jindal also has global and high-tech aspirations. In 2003, it acquired French firm Rexor (Paladru), which produces specialty metallized and coated films, as well as tear tape, stamping foil, security threads for bank notes, and other high-value products. Rexor holds proprietary technologies for laser demetallization of security threads and for slitting films into widths as short as 0.20 mm.

Jindal is also attracting global attention. In February 2005, Deutsche Investitions-und Entwicklungs GmbH, one of Europe’s largest development finance institutions, acquired a 9.5% equity interest in the company.

Breck Speed

Notable processor? Well, there is more to Breck Speed than plastics processing, but he founded a processing business, too. Speed is CEO and chairman of Mountain Valley Spring Co. (Hot Springs National Park, AR), a major water bottler in the U.S. He also founded and continues to help manage Veriplas Containers (Little Rock, AR), which blowmolds for the water bottling division. Oh, and he has worked as a lawyer and pilots his own plane.

The growth of the firm has been more heady than steady. “In the 1990s, I had to fight to keep growth down to 25%/yr levels,” he recalls, as bottled water become almost a hip accessory for yuppies. “We couldn’t bring on new people fast enough.”

Before acquiring Mountain Valley Spring Co., Speed was CEO at Clear Mountain Spring Water LLC, a bottled water company he founded in 1988. Ten years later, and dissatisfied with the supply of blowmolded bottles available to small-to-mid-sized bottlers such as his, he took the reins in his hands and founded Veriplas Containers Inc. Veriplas continues to supply its water bottling parent firm, and continues to supply other beverage bottlers, but also has branched out into custom processing of bottles for personal care and other industries. Speed offers a refreshingly open mind about the trials and tribulations facing his twin industries. “The green movement is demonstrably wrong about America’s tap-water quality; standards for tap water just aren’t that high,” he says, justifying the bottled water market. “But the green movement is 100% correct on the need to recycle more PET.” At the Nova-Pack conference in Orlando in February, Speed went so far as to support a national recycling scheme. “The industry has been fighting this—and the industry is wrong.”

Mike Springer

Affiliated with the company for the last 22 years (14 as a customer, eight as an employee), Mike Springer, VP sales and marketing at structural foam/web molder Horizon Plastics Co. Ltd. (Cobourg, ON), brings an often empathetic perspective to client relations.

“If a customer phones up and says, ’I’m in a panic—Wal-Mart had a real run on my product, and I gave you a poor forecast; how soon can you get the tool in?’ We’ll basically say, ’How soon can you get trucks here?’ So we’re very reactive. That’s the strength of our company, and that’s what we’ve built our reputation on. I saw that from a customer standpoint, so when they get into that situation, I know exactly what they’re talking about.”

Along with Brian Clarkson, company COO, Springer acts as one of Horizon Plastics’ President and Owner Brian Read’s “two right-hand men.” Located one hour east of Toronto, Horizon was founded in 1972 by Clay Elliott and his wife Elaine. Elliott passed away in 2002, but not before his low-pressure structural foam business grew to 21 machines, ranging from 200 to 1000 tons, with shot sizes up to 250 lb. The company operates 24/7 with 300 employees on staff and 300,000 ft² of space.

Springer was hired to help grow the business, which, given the versatility of the process, touches a wide range of end markets. When MPW spoke to Springer, he had just toured the plant with a new customer. “[The customer and I] are standing in the middle of the plant,” Springer says, “and we’re looking around and saying, ’Look at all the different industries we’ve got,’” seeing parts destined for everything from playgrounds to telecommunications, with one of the latest projects—a nucleating box to speed the development of queen bees—headed to California almond orchards. With four new projects in various stages of startup, Springer knows his customers are happy molds have arrived. “I know the feeling of signing those checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars for tooling, and going, ’Gee, I hope I’m doing the right thing.’

Front Page