PETpla.net Insider 06 / 2019

BOTTLE MAKING 54 PET planet Insider Vol. 20 No. 06/19 www.petpla.net Tech-Long’s strategy for becoming the equipment supplier of choice Good quality, good business In May 2018 we met: Keith Boss, CEO and Johnson Zhang, President Before leaving Georgia, we stopped by at Tech-Long Inc., the 100% owned subsidiary of Tech-Long Packaging Machines Co Ltd. Established in 2012, the company is located in Duluth, near Atlanta. We met CEO Keith Boss, who has been with Tech-Long for 4 years now and asked him about his time with Tech-Long and his future plans with the company. Tech-Long Inc. has set up dedicated service centres for the Americas and is striving to offer high reactivity and best in class services on its installed base. As a manufacturer of PET blow moulders, Tech-Long provides a full range of blow moulding machines for the bottle converter market. The range covers all needs in terms of outputs, and bottle formats ranging from 0.2 l to 20 l containers. There is a bottle design and testing centre and a spare parts stock. “2017 was a break through year; we have now a base of 100 installed machines fillers, blowers, packers, palletis- ers or complete lines, we are making a lot of progress,” Keith Boss began. He described the customer structure of Tech-Long and the development of the customer behaviour, “It took some time to make the initial sales, at least a few months, but in the end the customer bought the machine, and later they come back for a second or even a third machine.” He remembered his first sale he did together with Johnson: “The first customer was CForce, and they bought a full line with an 8 cavity system for 500ml water bottles, and then, a year and a half later, they came back to us to buy a gallon capacity machine.” With over 53,000 square foot of production space, CForce Bottling Co. is one of the biggest private bottling companies in Texas, providing full-service production: filling, capping and packaging bottles for ship- ment. “We have a lot of repeat customers. That is a good signal to us that we are servicing the market in the right way,“ Keith continued. “We doubled our business from 2017 to 2018. This will continue because we think we have the ideal combination of best equipment and good service. The water market is growing and there is a lot of old equipment in the US: The market was capitalised in the 90s and old equipment now needs replacing. This will grow the market, and we will be well positioned to take this business,” he pointed out. One of the challenges that Keith identified is coming from his customers is the prob- lem of buying resin. PET is the package of choice and he sees this continuing. In the US Keith identified two trends: “There is still some light weighting, for example the 1 l gallon with 60 g. The big supermarkets like Walmart are selling on price, so they need to see a reduction in packag- ing costs. That is one part of the market, the other one is a lot of growth of new brands for example like Core, located on the West Coast and in New York, selling a premium package and not only a bottle; it is produced on a 16-cavity blow moulder from us.” Keith Boss, CEO Tech-Long, Heike Fischer and Johnson Zhang, President Tech-Long (from left)