Eyeing growing demand for plastic fuel tanks in India, China's Yapp Automotive Parts Co. and an Indian partner, Zoom Developers Pvt. Ltd., have set up a joint venture blow molding plant at a Ford Motor Co. supplier park in Chennai, India.
The $12.8 million plant will have a capacity for about 250,000 tanks a year, of between 7.9 and 26 gallons, said Chinese news reports. The facility represents a significant expansion into India's market for Yapp, China's largest maker of plastic fuel tanks.
Officials from both firms did not respond to requests for comment but press reports said the head of Ford India Pvt. Ltd. attended the plant's opening ceremony in early June, and that Ford had recently ramped up production of its Figo hatchback, a variant of the Fiesta, in India.
Yapp, based in Yangzhou, reportedly owns 51 percent of the venture; Zoom, the rest.
Mumbai-based Zoom is a conglomerate with interests in engineering, infrastructure, and information technology. On its website, Zoom said it uses JSW coextrusion sequential blow molding machines for fuel-tank production, and it acquired monolayer and multilayer high density polyethylene fuel-tank production equipment from Nissan Motor Co.
Yapp claims 50 percent of the market for plastic fuel tanks in China. It supplies domestic firms and the China factories of Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, Audi, Hyundai and others.
The company was founded in 1988 by Chinese carmaker Shanghai Automotive Industry Co. Ltd. and China's State Development and Investment Corp.
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