PETpla.net Insider 03 / 2010

PREFORM PRODUCTION 21 PET planet insider Vol. 11 No. 03/10 www.petpla.net excellent production process which takes into account the sometimes special conditions prevailing here in India. When we acquired the site in 2001 we renovated the building for preform manufacturing from ground level upwards with assistance from KraussMaffei and optimised it for efficient production, again taking into account local conditions. KraussMaf- fei gave us good support in building up an optimum infrastructure for our production, and this is paying divi- dends, even from the point of view of cost“. AMD - the indian one-stop shop Well known in India and South East Asia for over 30 years as a supplier of crown corks to the beverages sector, the company decided in 2000 to enter the rapidly growing PET market as suppliers. Currently the company has a capac- ity of 18,000t of preforms per year and 800 million plastic caps for CSD. This makes the company, by its own admis- sion, the only manufacturer able to supply crown corks, 2-section caps and preforms. The young – and impres- sively dynamic -company helmsman, Adit Gupta describes this as a “one stop shop“. “Coming to us means that the CSD fillers get everything from a single source”. In India, one half of CSD is Pep- sico and the other half Coca Cola with AMD supplying its above products to both the companies. In the plant it is very easy to distinguish which batch is going to whom. There is no need to look at the supply sticker on the cartons: the small cartons go to Pepsi and the big octabins that are recog- nised all over the world go to Coca Cola. In response to my question as to how the large boxes get on to the traditionally manually loaded HGVs, he made a startlingly straightforward reply: “Using a fork lift. We have an Alexander Büchler (in the centre) at his visit of the AMD plant together with WG CDR ML Sharma (right) and a Technical Manager The boxes are filled by 3 Krauss- Maffei lines. The first has a clamping force of 300t, the other two are slightly larger at 325t each. “With the larger clamping area we can now not only run the 56-compartment moulds from MHT, as we did before, but there is now a 72-compartment mould on the way. The same preforms are produced in India across the full range of filler brands, in each case in the lighter as well as the classic variants, like the 22 gram for 1 litre of water, the 27 and 28g, the 42g, the 48g and the pre- forms with PC028 weighing 52 and 54g. This is set to change. For Adit Gupta it is clear that now the next logi- cal step for Coca Cola (and thus for him too) is the 1881 cap. This is now, at long last, available in China, North America and, since October 2009, in Germany too. For Adit Gupta, this will mean a high investment in new moulds, although not only preforms but also capping moulds. “At the end of the day nobody is paying for the new moulds for me, but I think that these will make us, technologically-speaking, market leaders and enable us to obtain additional orders as well. Our custom- ers are familiar with the quality of our products. Many filler companies have confirmed to us that their blow mould- ing machines run more quietly when loaded with our preforms and are up to 15% faster”. He envisages that any additional orders in the caps sector from outside India will come from markets that are realizing the low cost advantage of India as a manufacturing