Has a China Presence Helped?

My Three Cents: In what ways have your operations in China bolstered your business?

By: Michelle Maniscalco Print this page

In what ways have your operations in China bolstered your business?

Jim Buonomo, chief financial officer and chief strategy officer
Nypro Inc., Clinton, MA
Business: Injection molding
Markets: Automotive, consumer, industrial, electronics, telecom, healthcare, packaging

Nypro has been involved in Asia since 1973, when we opened a tooling shop in Hong Kong. We entered mainland China in 1993 with the opening of our Shenzhen plant, which features over 70 machines as well as cleanroom molding. We now have about half of our workforce (8000 out of 16,000 worldwide) and a third of our $1 billion global sales coming from Asia, with 90% of Asian sales out of five factory complexes in China. Nypro would not be the company we are today without the China component of our history.

Our customers are the world’s best companies in healthcare, consumer, electronics, packaging, and precision automotive markets. To serve them, we must be where they are. To be trusted by these types of companies to make their products, we have to become very much like those customers themselves in style, thinking, and execution. Growing in China, and around the world, has helped to grow Nypro in the United States.

Tom Opelewski VP, UPG, Asia
UPG International, Chicago, IL
Business: Injection molding
Markets: Medical, consumer, automotive, electronics

China does more than “bolster”; it’s an essential cornerstone to our business. As a contract manufacturer, we follow our customers and, across all our segments, they have turned to China. Most go there for cost savings, at least at first. But they stay for opportunity or quality.

Opportunity takes two forms in China. The first is to make the most of a highly motivated and highly educated workforce where there are multiple incentives for manufacturing. The second, rapidly growing opportunity involves marketing to the burgeoning domestic China market specifically and the Pacific Rim in general.

Quality in China, as anywhere, is earned through continuous effort, and China is an ideal place for finding both effort and intelligent problem-solving. In the last five years, we have increasingly enjoyed our position as a catalyst between knowledgeable, global design and marketing capabilities and timely, efficient production in one of the most promising areas in the world.

Frank Pellegrino, VP, engineering
International Smart Sourcing Inc.
Farmingdale, NY and Shanghai, China
Business: Injection molding, moldmaking
Markets: Appl., consumer, govt., bus. equip., telecom, elec., power tools, sporting goods

While we still have some molding operations in the U.S., most of our manufacturing today is done in China. In 1999, we began to outsource there to reduce our manufacturing needs internally. We set up a network of qualified vendors for plastics processing, and then began offering the service to other molders. We now have offices in Shanghai and Ningbo with teams responsible for logistics and vendor surveys along with a plastics dept. manager, administrator, QC support, and a tooling engineer. Orders are placed with us, and we take responsibility for everything—tooling, production, quality, and logistics.

Our growth in the past seven years has been phenomenal, but this did not come easily. We had to partner with Chinese molders, and then put our own people in the factory to ensure success. For our OEM and molder customers, we’ve taken the risk and liability out of manufacturing in China, and we enable U.S. molders to remain competitive through outsourcing.

IMM - December 2006

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