Canadian mold maker StackTeck Systems Ltd. now has operations in Hwaseong, South Korea.
The 139,000-square-foot facility opened in 2010 as a subsidiary of StackTeck's parent company, a Hong Kong-based global investment firm. Going forward, the South Korean mold making business will operate as StackTeck Asia.
StackTeck makes stack molds, single-face molds, molds for caps and closures as well as other types of tooling for high-volume production, including thin-wall packaging, in-mold labeling and other applications. The South Korean site, which employs 65, builds molds for PET preforms and closures as well as other medical and packaging applications.
As part of StackTeck's sharper focus on PET preform molds, the Brampton, Ontario-based mold maker announced Jan. 10 it had appointed Rick Unterlander as general manager, where he will focus on PET preform projects in the Americas and act as a liaison to StackTeck Asia.
"[Unterlander] is effectively the liaison based in North America to the plant that has a very significant amount of experience building PET preform molds, which is a category of mold that in North America we have not built molds for that application in the past," Jordan Robertson, StackTeck's vice president of business development and marketing, said in a Jan. 10 phone interview.
To date, the StackTeck Asia facility has built more than 100 PET preform molds, the company said.
"The molds that have been built in the past by StackTeck Asia in the segment of PET preforms have been delivered to customers in Asia. Now there is a movement to approach the rest of the world and especially for the Americas, where StackTeck Systems is a large and significant mold maker," Robertson said.
"There's a tremendous synergy between the companies where we can take a proven mold design that has been very successful in Asia and we have capabilities in our business based in Canada to build and deliver and service molds in the Americas," he added.
From StackTeck's Brampton mold making plant, Robertson said the company typically exports around 95 percent of what it manufactures outside of Canada, with a significant portion of that going to the United States. The company also has representatives in Latin America, Asia and Europe.
"We have wide variations from year to year," he said. "In the last decade, we've had a year where Asia was 28 percent of our sales. We've had a year where Latin America was almost 40 percent of our sales, so depending where the big programs are happening and depending on how many global programs happen and where the orders come from, we really can have very significant swings with respect to where we're shipping our molds to."
StackTeck, which employs 255 at its head office and mold making plant in Canada, is listed at No. 14 on Plastics News' most recent ranking of North American mold and toolmakers, with estimated 2017 sales of $55 million.
