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Plastics products have attained a global market.
Higher labour costs in North America and Europe have polarised the
market scene completely. More and more production plants have been
relocated from these regions to the Asia Pacific region to take
advantage of lower manpower cost.
China particularly has become the preferred manufacturing
base for plastics conversion. It is estimated that almost 5 million
tonnes of converted products are exported from China alone. This
polarisation has brought about the two most important aspects involved
into focus; Quality and Effective Cost Economy.
For injection moulded products, these two parameters
could lead to the need of hot runners. It is well known that hot
runners enhance quality of moulded products. They provide singinficant
advantages to multi cavity moulds. Infact, hot runners provide considerable
advantages for those products that are manufactured in large volumes
(such as caps/closures) and are very cost sensitive. Along with
improving quality, hot runners also reduce scrap generation considerably.
Today the manufacturing of many moulded products
such as PET bottles or PE/PP closures cannot be imagined without
hot runners. No wonder hot runners are increasing their share of
the total Injection Moulding markets. Experts claim that almost
25% of the total demand of runners is for hot runners. Their growth
in the North American and European market is almost 20%. The last
few years have seen significant increase in demand from Asian markets.
This has led to all major suppliers of hot runners focussing their
efforts in the fast growing Asian Pacific regions.
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