Milacron Inc. plans to resume extruder production in Europe and has chosen the Uniloy Milacron facility in Magenta, Italy, for its return.
The Batavia-based firm will start off by stocking parts and doing some assembly in Magenta by fall, said Tom Brown, Milacron's general sales and product manager for extruders, in a telephone interview. Next year it will work to get full assembly under way.
Milacron's offshore extruder sales have been growing since a noncompete clause ended in January 2005. When it sold its Vienna, Austria, extruder operation in 1999 to SMS AG, it agreed not to compete with SMS outside North America. In October, Milacron showed it was gearing up to compete again in Europe when it unveiled Batavia-built machines aimed at European markets. The strategy pits Milacron against SMS-owned Cincinnati Extrusion GmbH of Vienna and other European extruder makers.
``You need local content,'' Brown said of machines that will be sold in Europe. It is easier to configure electrics and other systems to European standards when a machine is built there, and local manufacturing simplifies and reduces costs for replacement parts, he said.