Toray Industries Inc. (Tokyo, Japan) announced on Dec. 26 that it has decided to establish a development and production base for carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) in Europe in a move aimed at expanding its business in the automobile sector. Toray will make equity participation (investment ratio: 21 percent) in Advanced Composite Engineering GmbH (ACE, Immenstaad, Germany), an advanced composites manufacturer. By embarking on local development and production of CFRP in Europe, where CFRP adoption in the automobile field is far advanced, Toray says it aims to achieve significant expansion of its automobile-related CFRP business, which is expected to grow markedly in the future.
Established in 2001, ACE develops, produces and sells CFRP parts for high-end vehicles, trucks and other vehicles. The company possesses high elemental technologies including mold jig technology, machining technology as well as automobile CFRP parts design and forming technology. It has earned high praise from major European car manufacturers for its mold quality and other aspects.
CFRP–based auto parts have until now been produced using the existing prepreg molding, which is time-consuming and cost-intensive, and the adoption is limited to a few super cars, for which market prices are extremely high, and production volumes are low. However, Toray says the threat of global warming has made further reductions in vehicle weight a pressing issue for automobile manufacturers, and this in turn has been boosting momentum for a full-fledged adoption of CFRP.
Toray notes that with further innovations being sought in CFRP molding technologies to promote full-scale penetration into high-end cars, resin transfer molding (RTM) technology is emerging as the mainstream technology that can support production of auto parts with mid-level production volumes in the range of 10,000 vehicles per annum. The capital investment announced this time is aimed at integrating ACE’s technologies with Toray’s proprietary RTM technology, which has a proven track record in mass production, to upgrade the molding technology and shorten its development period, thereby leading to the early establishment of an innovative molding technology that can be fully adopted for automobile parts used in mass production models.
Toray has been actively allocating its management resources to expand its businesses targeted at the automobile and aircraft field, including the establishment of the Automotive & Aircraft Center (A&A Center) at its Nagoya Plant (Nagoya City, Japan), an integrated technological development base for the automobiles and aircraft field. At the A&A Center, the Advanced Composite Center (ACC) will open in April 2009, after the opening of the Automotive Center (AMC), the automobile-related technology development center last October. At the ACC, Toray plans to work on practical applications of high-cycle molding technology, an advanced version of the RTM technology, and also aims to accelerate the development of next-generation composite materials based on thermoplastics resin for use in mass production in vehicle applications. In addition to the establishment of development structure in Japan, Toray positions ACE as the development basis of CFRP in Europe, and will promote global development of CFRP for automobile applications. Toray says it will accelerate and promote the use of CFRP in automobile applications and is planning to expand its business sales of CFRP for automobile applications to approximately ¥50 billion/$555 million (USD) by about 2015.
Toray is currently promoting the “expansion of advanced materials in four major growth areas,” which is one of the basic strategies of its new mid-term business strategy Project Innovation TORAY 2010 (IT-2010). Toray aims to accelerate the process of transforming itself into a highly profitable corporate group by strengthening and expanding its advanced material business in the automobiles and aircraft field, one of its core business areas.
ACE GmbH has annual sales of about €5,806,000.
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