The Irish Times reports that Galway-based design and manufacturing company CF Tooling opened a new production facility in the southern Chinese production hub of Dongguan. The €7 million factory will build server racks for the China market for IBM.
CF Tooling’s managing director John Flaherty said “In December last year we picked a greenfield site here and now it’s ready to run…I came here five times in all. This was a building site three weeks ago. We’re planning to make 500 to 600 server racks a week here. We have capacity for 900 and we’re also going to offer the facility to our other customers.”
CF Tooling already has operations in Athenry, Co Galway; the UK, the Czech Republic and the Philippines, and employs 1,000 people. Turnover in 2007 was €63 million and is forecast to rise to €77 million. Its customers include IBM, American Power Conversion, Ingersoll Rand, Linde Carrier, Toshiba, Hitachi and Glen Dimplex. CF makes the same racks in Ireland and the Czech Republic, with the Irish operation supplying Dublin and the Czech plant supplying Hungary. Flaherty said: “IBM asked us to come to China. We made a commitment in December last year to be ready in China – in fact we made a bet, IBM said they’d buy us a dinner if we managed to do it…big companies want global solutions. We couldn’t be a global supplier to IBM if we just had Galway. We wouldn’t be doing any business.”
The factory is in the town of Qingxi, part of the huge manufacturing city of Dongguan. Exports from Qingxi were worth €3.7 billion last year and the town is home to 800 companies. “It was no problem to set up here. People think you can get lost in China, and you can, but if you follow rules and regulations you’ve no problem,” Mr Flaherty added. “It’s like anywhere else, similar to the Philippines in fact for us.”We will be successful here like we are anywhere else – we bring the knowledge of the Irish manufacturing process to the world, and the efficiencies that we’ve built in over the years.”
Contributed by Professor Roy Green.
