Precision tubing extruder Boramed Inc. is in the midst of a rapid expansion and aims to spin off from its parent company in the next 18 months.
The small Durham, N.C., company doubled to 20 employees in the last year as it added three extrusion lines to expand into the industrial semiconductor market. The company plans to add unspecified extrusion equipment in the next year to make polytetrafluoroethylene medical tubing, said President Andrew Kennedy.
Boramed was formed in 1998 by Diba Industries Inc. in Danbury, Conn., because Diba could not find tubing suppliers that could meet the company's price and delivery needs, Kennedy said. The goal always was for Diba to start the firm and then sell it. Diba makes fluid-handling systems and tubing assemblies for diagnostic equipment.
``That was in the plan from the beginning - that we would get to a certain critical mass and spin off,'' Kennedy said in an interview at the Medical Design & Manufacturing West show in Anaheim.
The company is interested in talking to any potential buyers, Kennedy said.
Kennedy declined to disclose sales figures, production capacity or the cost of the recent capital expansions. The addition of extrusion equipment to do PTFE medical tubes ``is a major expansion of capacity,'' Kennedy said.
About half of the fluoropolymers used in medical are PTFE, so the company needed the capability to extrude PTFE paste to make itself attractive for a sale, he said.
The firm has a 30,000-square-foot plant where it extrudes, injection molds and machines luer fittings and makes tube assemblies. It also builds molds.
Semiconductor manufacturers use the firm's tubing as pipes to transport acids that are then used to etch semiconductor wafers. The company got into that market because other consolidation in the industry supplying semiconductor manufacturers opened up an opportunity, he said.