Mexico City — Chinese injection molding machine maker Haitian International Holdings Ltd. officially opened its first manufacturing site in the Americas on June 21.
The US$55 million facility in western Mexico has been up and running for almost a year and has already produced 300 hydraulic presses, 100 of which have been sold, Carlos Calderón, the plant's joint general manager, told Plastics News in a June 22 telephone interview.
The first presses have been sold to customers in Latin America. Machines for the U.S. market will be ready to ship in late 2023 or early 2024.
According to Calderón, the plant has annual capacity to build 1,000 machines, ranging from 60 to 530 metric tons.
Asked whether at some point Haitian will produce electric presses in addition to hydraulic machines at the facility, Calderón said there was no plan to do so "in the short term."
The plant, in Acatlán de Juárez, about 30 miles from Guadalajara, has 160 full time employees working on the shop floor. Its roofed area covers 290,625 square feet and it stands on a 968,752-square-foot plot of land that Haitian owns.
José Barroso, commercial director of the company's local subsidiary, Haitian Huayuan Mexico S de RL de CV, first told Plastics News about the project at Plastimagen México in early 2019.
In 2019, he told Plastics News that Haitian posted sales in Mexico of about $32 million, and sold about 400 presses in the country. Barroso said the company was the leading press supplier in Mexico, with a market share he estimated at about 30 percent.
A spokesperson for Worcester, Mass.-based Absolute Haitian Corp., the exclusive sales and service unit for Haitian injection presses in the United States and Canada, said the new Mexican facility employs more than 200, including office staff.