Chemicals company Şişecam Group is to invest around 100 million euros to construct a new glass fiber manufacturing plant at the heart of Turkey's wind energy turbine industry in the northwest of the country.
Group offshoot Şişecam Fibre Glass, formerly known as Cam Elyaf Sanayii A.Ş., intends to put the 70,000-metric-tonne-per-year facility at Balikesir. The operation is due to go on stream in the second half of next year.
The new plant is set to turn out the current range of e-glass fiber reinforcing products for the production of a range of glass-fiber-filled engineering thermoplastics and a variety of composite applications including unsaturated polyester, vinyl ester and polyurethane resins.
Apart from the wind energy sector, the Şişecam unit expects to serve the automotive, marine, land transportation, marine, industrial and construction industries with its main customers in Europe.
Today, Şişecam Glass Fibre is Turkey's only glass fiber manufacturer with an existing plant in Gebze, Kocaeli southeast of the group base in Istanbul. This facility supplies customers in 30 countries around the globe.
Şişecam, a major producer of flat glass, glassware and glass packaging, has been in the glass fiber business since 1974. “Şişecam has a leading position in starting and developing the Turkish composite industry, which has now reached a volume of 1.2 billion euros,” commented group vice chairman and chief executive Ahmet Kırman.
The Turkish group runs 44 production plants in Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, Ukraine and Russia as well as in Egypt and India and employs overall more than 21,000.