PETpla.net Insider 12 / 2020

BOTTLE MAKING 24 PETplanet Insider Vol. 21 No. 12/20 www.petpla.net Interview with Limner Technology Co., Ltd. June 19, 2020 We met: Mr Aaron Lai, Managing Director Taiwan cosmetic containers for the West by Kay Barton We met Aaron Lai, head of the family-owned PET converter, Limner Technology, in Tai- chung, Taiwan. His company specialises in cosmetics and beauty care products and manu- factures delicate heavy-wall PET bottles and jars. Next year, the team will celebrate its 20 th anniversary, although its experience in plastics goes back 50 years when Mr Lai’s father, Lai Wen-Sheng, used to produce moulds for the cosmetics industry. With more and more experience and increasing popularity within the sector, the next logical step was for Limner to establish its own production line for containers. The company has set up ten production lines for containers and three for caps. 80% of all products are made from PET. Its main customers are clearly in the top-quality end of the packaging sector. With 40 staff, a turn- over of US$3 million and 18% growth, the Lai family is now seeking to expand its already flourishing business in the USA, Japan and Taiwan, as well as local overseas locations to enable them to be more selective when supplying local markets. “When we founded Limner Technology in 2001 our vision was to devise an all-in-one solution by which we could provide custom bottle designs using our own moulds and matching decoration”, said Mr Lai when speaking of the concept and its early stages. “We started out by producing extruded shampoo and later drinks’ bottles, but in the medium term we wanted to use our moulds in more challenging areas. The realisation that these could pos- sibly become thick-walled and heavy PET containers came to me during the Cosmoprof cosmetics trade fair in Bologna. I had a very hard time finding good quality containers like these there, even though the trend for using PET in cosmetics packag- ing had been gaining ground for some time. Obviously, it was still a real struggle to produce such containers at that time. Nevertheless, we were excited by the idea and decided, hey let’s do it! The project involved three years intensive work until we had all the difficult areas such as thick-wall preform design, material crystallisa- tion and vials under control. We were then finally able to produce contain- ers which looked just like glass and so take cosmetics in PET to the next level. In 2015, we launched our “Aquapet” bottle. Since then, we have been targeting two main customer groups. Firstly, those who can choose from a wide range of ready-made standard containers and designs from our portfolio, and those for whom we can develop and manufacture a com- plete product design”. Limner’s single stage machinery by Nissei ASB Tour Sponsors: Managing Director Aaron Lai