PETpla.net Insider 06 / 2019

MOULD MAKING 46 PET planet Insider Vol. 20 No. 06/19 www.petpla.net Wentworth Mold’s growth in tooling and plastic processing Know your business and keep an open mind In May 2018 we met: Tar Tsau, General Manager, V.P. Sales & Engineering and Sergio Arango, Sales Manager North America In February 2015 PETplanet visited their good friends of Wentworth in Stoney Creek, Ontario. In November the same year the CEO Walter T. Kuskowski bought a new production facility and warehouse to provide space to expand mould and tool production as well as for plastic processing. Mr Tar Tsau, General Manager and Sergio Arango, Sales Manager of North America welcomed us during our North American Road Show in the new 200,000 square foot production hall and warehouse of Wentworth in Brantford, ON, Canada. Tour Sponsors: develop a lot of innovation projects to meet customers’ requests. “We not only produce moulds, we are dedicated to provide best value and peace of mind to our customers. You only need to contact one person for any questions. Our sales repre- sentative will update you on quoting or project progress, assist with shipping, engineering and invoicing!” For South American customers especially they do a lot of product drawing from scratch; sometimes, they receive requests for preform design and development for which they work in cooperation with their sister company Electraform Indus- tries. “So we can do preform prototyp- ing in a couple of weeks and in parallel do bottle design to ensure customers shorten their time to market.” Sergio adds: “From the bottle sample we are able to produce unique moulds which enable us to produce a few bottles we did not have previously.” They came only slowly to blowing and testing bot- tles mainly due to customer demand. Previously they had worked with third parties for this processing. “For us it is better to synergise all these production steps under one roof to maintain con- trol of production,” Sergio continues. “70% of our sale is in PET. That is our principal business. Primarily for two-stage PET, but we also have capability with one-stage PET blow moulds and extrusion as well, also for HDPE,” Sergio emphasised. “We have experienced rapid growth in the pro- cessing group in the last 10 years” Tar confirmed, “about 2 to 3 times; a lot of this is from acquisition as well.” Tar Tsau explained: “We desper- ately needed more space to accom- modate more thermoforming machines to produce drinking cups and lids, and food packaging for example. Today Wentworth Mold occupies one corner of the building for blow mould making.” Tar told us that two principal groups come under the umbrella of Wentworth Technologies: plastics processing and mould & tooling. Wentworth Mold’s main business sectors in the tooling group are pre- form tooling and blow moulds. They sell 400-500 moulds a month. There is also some precision machining and general machining. “From Canada we sell stretch blow moulds for the American market which represents about 30% of manufacturing, while 70% comes from our state of the art manufacturing plant in Poland.” From Canada, Wentworth supplies the whole of the US and South American market. “Sales and technical sup- port come from here, plus any new development or new innovation. The majority of our customers are from the US, and we keep in close contact with our customers,” Tar continued. The Far East business is very small at the moment, whilst Eastern and Western Europe is served by Poland. The special thing about Went- worth, which distinguishes them from other tool makers, is that they recog- nised the trend for customers trying to shift some of the development work in product design down to the mould makers. That is what they do on top: Inside the new production hall of Wentworth in Brantford, Ontario