Avance Industrial SA de CV, which claims to be Sumitomo (SHI) Demag Plastics Machinery GmbH's best-selling overseas representative, plans to start construction of a $2 million technical center in west-central Mexico in the second quarter of this year.
The project will cost twice the amount Avance, of Mexico City, intended to spend when it told Plastics News of its plans in September 2013. But the company's managing director, Peter Kramer, said the current project is far more ambitious and will entail 3,000 square meters of building on 5,340 square meters of land in the city of Querétaro.
The construction will include Avance's technical center and two 800-square-meter warehouses that will be rented out to help the company recover much of its outlay.
“Querétaro is growing 7-9 percent a year,” said Kramer's son, Alexander, Avance's technical director, who added that it was the construction company that suggested Avance fully develop its “attractive site,” which is close to the city's airport, so as to maximize its potential.
Kramer Sr., who co-founded Avance Industrial in 1963, claims the company is the oldest Demag representative agency in the world and the most successful, having sold in excess of 1,400 injection molding presses in Mexico.
With sales of $20 million, “for us 2015 was a good year,” he said in an interview. “We reached our sales goals regarding injection molding machines, our main product line, and succeeded in extending our market share a little bit.”
In the same telephone interview Alexander Kramer said the automotive and packaging industries — the main sectors that Avance supplies — continue to expand, and growth will last “at least for the next three years.”
On the packaging side, he said, “we have gained market share where once Husky [Injection Molding Systems] was very strong.” He added that the Sumitomo Demag El-Exis “is the fastest machine on the market for packaging and we have been very successful in getting new customers.”
Despite the budget cuts announced by the Mexican government in mid-February, a result of falling crude oil prices worldwide, Kramer Sr. said: “The plastics industry in Mexico will have a good year in 2016.”
“The good news,” added his son, “is that the Mexican economy is not so dependent on oil. Today the automotive industry generates more income” than oil.
Avance is showing the following at its Plastimagen stand:
• From Sumitomo Demag, an ultra-high-speed El-Exis SP 350 hybrid machine, producing plastic caps for water bottles on a two-second cycle using a 64-cavity mold from Corvaglia in Switzerland.
• A high-speed Systec SP 160 hybrid machine, making thin-wall containers with in-mold labels.
• A fully electric SE100EV, built in Japan, producing components for a remote control key for cars. Parts are removed by a Sepro robot model SR-5U22.
• Frigel water cooling systems and mold temperature controllers
• Motan-Colortronic dryers, hopper loaders, dosing and mixing equipment
• Regloplas temperature control units.
