Posted August 2, 2016
TOKYO – Toray Industries, Inc. announced that it will open an automobile airbag nylon fiber and fabric business at its Mexican subsidiary Toray Advanced Textile Mexico (TAMX), S.A.de C.V.
TAMX will introduce production facilities with annual production capacity of about 10,000 tons of nylon fibers for airbags and airbag materials by investing approximately 10 billion yen within the Mexican plant premise of Zoltek Companies, Inc., a large tow carbon fiber production subsidiary of Toray. TAMX’s production facilities are expected to start operations in March 2018.
Mexico has been rapidly growing as an automobile production base by leveraging the wide-ranging free trade network and geographical proximity to the United States. Recently, a number of airbag manufactures launched their businesses in Mexico, and the demand for airbag fabrics in the Americas is expected to continue growing significantly primarily in Mexico.
The establishment of the new production base in Mexico is in response to such growing demand and to strengthen Toray’s local supply capability by building an integrated production system from yarn to fabric in Americas, which is one of the most prominent airbag fabric market in the world, and capture the robust demand for airbag fabric around the world including Asia and Europe.
Currently, Toray supplies nylon fibers produced in Japan and Thailand to its airbag fabric production bases in Japan, Thailand, China and the Czech Republic in its integrated production system from yarns to fabric around the world. Toray has been continuously working on the expansion of its production and sales structure such as a launch of airbag fabric production in India in October 2016.
Expanding global production
Adding Mexico to this structure will further reinforce the global production structure, enabling Toray to supply airbag fabric of the same quality from all production sites in a timely manner. It will also accelerate Toray’s business expansion by utilizing its development capability with the integrated production covering from yarns to fabric, and Toray aims to acquire the largest share in the global airbag fabric market in 2020.
Toray to open airbag business in Mexico
As part of the basic strategy to continuously expand profits under the current medium-term management program Project AP-G 2016, Toray has been pursuing the Asia, America and Emerging Country Business Expansion (AE-II) Project to actively strengthen the organic cooperation among the Toray Group business bases, develop new markets and expand businesses.
Toray said it positions the automobile airbag business as one of these priority businesses and aims to further expand it globally.
Source: Toray