India-based Vasantha invests $7M to open mold making support firm in Ohio

Hyderabad, India-based Vasantha Group invested $7 million to open a mold building support facility in West Chester, Ohio, giving it a foothold in the United States as it looks to grow in the medical and packaging markets in North America.

Called VasanthaTech USA, the engineering firm created 20 new jobs related to prototyping, insert molding, high-cavitation molds, micromolding and liquid silicone rubber molding.

The staff works out of a rented facility with 16,000 square feet of manufacturing space and more than 15 machines — including brands like Arburg, Sodick and Makino — for designing parts, proving concepts and producing trial runs.

The Ohio team works closely with VasanthaTech colleagues in India and Austria, eliminating the need for customers to travel to overseas sites, according to VasanthaTech Sales Manager Andrew Cummings.

VasanthaTech customers can find full support in Ohio for production equipment that needs adjustments or spare parts as well as production projects that need design and tooling strategies or factory acceptance tests, Cummings said in a phone interview.

"We are manufacturing one-, two- and four-cavity molds in Ohio, for example, to prove a concept and plan for scalability," Cummings said. "Then, if the customer needs integrated automation, we might build that in Austria, and if they need a 32-cavity mold — and its more budgetary conscious — we build that in India. Then we can ship the automation and the mold from Austria and India to Cincinnati, where we'd integrate it and assemble it."

VasanthaTech handles all the logistics of working with the Austria and India locations to manage the project and have the finished mold shipped to the U.S.

Cummings said the goal is to support the customers Vasantha has and attract new customers who want to do as much business in the U.S. as possible to eliminate overseas travel expenses, time zone differences and language barriers.

Some of Vasantha's large medical customers have sent a team of five people to work a week with their experts in India and Austria on new tooling.

"That could cost $20,000 right there. Local travel and support will be a big benefit for our customers," Cummings said, adding the Ohio site will have office space for them, too.

In July, four new Fanuc Roboshot molding machines ranging from 180-450 metric tons will be installed to run trials on larger molds.

Also, a new Class 8 clean room for medical molding applications will be available this summer. One customer will use it to run 10,000 parts to prove a concept, said Cummings, who previously worked at Mold-Masters Ltd. and Zahoransky Automation & Molds.

If VasanthaTech stays busy over the next five years, then the owner plans to invest up to another $15 million to buy or build a more permanent home for the engineering firm and staff it with up to 60 employees.

Cummings called the initial $7 million outlay a "soft start."

"We made this investment and we're looking to spread the word," Cummings said. "We want to generate more business to justify further expansion to support our North American customers and their production tooling and automation from India and Austria. And then maybe at some time down the line, we could eventually start building production tools here, but that's not the near future."

Company officials made the decision to expand to the U.S. in 2019, according to Varun Reddy, Vasantha Group director of sales and foreign operations.

"We hired a few key employees to start the process, and since then we've invested over $7 million to acquire a facility, machinery and more. We are now ready to move forward building our business in North America," Reddy said in a news release.

One of the key hires is industry veteran Shawn Schnee to be VasanthaTech's CEO. He joined the company after working as manager of advanced engineering at Hamilton, Ohio-based Imflux Inc., a software and engineering firm that is in the process of downsizing.

"We have 20 people here now, but this is just the beginning for us," Schnee said in the release.

Vasantha Group has 650 employees worldwide, including a new automation venture called Savya Automation, which has locations in India and Austria. Savya offers injection molding automation, including end-of-arm-tools for part handling, transport, sorting and boxing.

The business group also consists of parent company Vasantha Tool Crafts Pvt. Ltd. in Hyderabad, India; V+ Solutions GmbH in Freiburg, Germany, which specializes in machine, mold and automation integration; and VTW GmbH Austria, which was formed by former employees of KTW, a division of Husky for precision high-cavitation molds.

When Husky proposed shutting down the facility, the employees found Vasantha Group as an investor. The group put 20 million euros ($21.6 million) into a new facility in Waidhofen/Thaya, Austria, in 2020 and renamed it VTW GmbH Austria.

Vasantha's plan to build up its presence in the U.S. is an example of foreign direct investment, which along with reshoring added 101,500 jobs in the first quarter of 2023, continuing to outpace recent records.

The figures come from the Sarasota, Fla.-based Reshoring Initiative, which says FDI outpaced reshoring until 2020, when the pandemic increased the need to shorten supply chains and companies made bigger efforts to close the gap for essential medical, technical and defense products.

Reshoring and FDI announcements are up 11 percent from 2022. If the current rate continues, then reshoring and FDI will surpass 400,000 jobs in 2023, with electrical equipment being the top industry following large investments in electric vehicle batteries, Reshoring Initiative says.