CHICAGO - Axxicon Group NV, the mold and mold-control maker based in Vianen, the Netherlands, will open customer and technical support offices in the United States in 1996. Jeroen A. Jonker, group marketing engineer, said the move into the U.S. market is part of an overall strategy to standardize its mold making, and serve customers better.
``Our basic strategy is to develop mold making for pro-cessing and product markets at the same time,'' he said.
Jonker said the company has not yet chosen a site for the customer and technical support offices and sales offices, but an East Coast site is likely.
The company has targeted the compact disc, medical, thin-walled packaging and smart-card markets as growth areas on which it intends to concentrate. Jonker said the company is producing standard molds for in-mold decorating and computer chip insertion, and high-quality disc production.
``We have always served our customers in the U.S. through our subsidiaries in Europe,'' Jonker said. ``But we would like to expand worldwide with standard molds that could be used on anyone's machinery instead of making each mold for each purpose and each machine.''
At Plastics USA, the firm showed its AIM brand line of tools for testing and comparison of molded parts. The line features customized, interchangable inserts that reduce change times to less than one minute, and work on conventional machinery.
``We are working toward being able to send out a catalog of standard molds,'' said Jonker. ``And there aren't many mold makers that can do that. Nor are there many that can offer standardized development and design. We are moving away from custom work.''