Germany-headquartered TPE producer Kraiburg will be expanding its Malaysian plant by 50% starting from August this year. “This move is in tandem with our company’s expansion plans,” said Roland Ritter, Director Asia Pacific, adding, “We are gearing ourselves to meet the huge demand of our products in the Asia Pacific region.”

The company will first enlarge the building, to cater to more lines for production in the future, though Ritter said the capacity increase will be announced later.

Kraiburg has had a plant in Selangor, Malaysia, since 2008. In 2012, it added a new line to increase the production volume to support the Asia Pacific market demand.

“Overall, we have had a 15% increase in sales in the Asia Pacific region, when comparing 2015 with 2014,” he added, speaking to PRA at the Chinaplas show in Guangzhou recently. “This positive increase shows that we are moving in the right direction. Our surveys have shown that a customer’s purchase decision is based on local influence. To succeed, we need to adopt a local touch and that is why we have offices in numerous countries.”

Besides Malaysia, the company has offices in China (Shanghai, Wuhan, Shenyang and Guangzhou), Hong Kong, Taiwan, India (Bangalore, Pune, Delhi and Chennai), Thailand, and Vietnam; with sales partners in Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Philippines.

It also has production facilities in Germany and the US. “We don’t need to have a facility in China. As a niche material supplier, we are able to produce the TPE at our production base in Malaysia and cater to fast delivery as well,” said Ritter.

At Chinaplas, Kraiburg revealed new high flow TPE compounds for window encapsulation. The UV/HF/SF, UV/LD/b, UV/FG and UV/AP series also features lower weight advantages, short cycle and cooling times, excellent adhesion to PP, significant reduction of sink marks and glass breakage, uniform gloss finishing all over the part surface, colour matchability, UV and detergent resistance with mechanical properties and more.

Applications include back window sealing lips, rear quarter window and many more.