Indian Mold Builder Opens First US Plant Near Cincinnati
Posted by Staff | May 30, 2023
India’s Vasantha Group has established its first North American facility in West Chester, OH, near Cincinnati, where it will build high-cavitation precision molds for the medical and packaging markets.
Vasantha Tech, as the US operation is called, is headed by Shawn Schnee, an industry veteran who has held positions at iMFLUX, where he was manager of advanced engineering, and medtech giant Ethicon, where he was a manufacturing technical specialist.
“We made the decision to expand to the USA in 2019,” said Varun Reddy, director of sales and foreign operations for Vasantha Group. “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.”
Vasantha said it plans to invest another $15 million to grow the North American business over the next five years. By 2028, the company anticipates having up to 60 employees working out of the West Chester facility.
In July, Vasantha Tech will take delivery of four new Fanuc Roboshot molding machines, ranging in size from 180 to 450 metric tons. They will join two Arburg machines that run liquid-silicone rubber and micro-molding applications. A new Class 8 cleanroom for medical molding will be installed this summer.
Andrew Cummings, sales manager for Vasantha Tech, joined the company in January after working in sales and product management roles at Mold-Masters Ltd. and Zahoransky Automation & Molds. He said the value that Vasantha’s new US facility provides customers includes the ability to run mold trials and provide complete customer support for Vasantha molds in the United States.
“We build development and pilot molds here, typically one- or two-cavity tools, to prove the concepts; then the high-cavitation production tools are built in Austria or India. The finished molds are shipped to our Cincinnati location, where customers can visit to see them for trials before they ship to their destination. All our customer support and mold trialing takes place at our Cincinnati location.”
Founded in 1989 in Hyderabad, India, Vasantha today has five leading brands on three continents along with a global service network. Subsidiaries include V+ Solutions in Freiburg, Germany, which provides machine/mold/automation integration services for the medical and packaging sectors; mold builder VTW in Austria, formerly KTW, a division of Husky; and molding automation specialist Sayva Automation, with locations in India and Austria.
At NPE2024, Vasantha Tech will have several of its molds in operation at its own booth as well as at partner company stands.
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