Shanghai Eltete Packaging Technology Co Ltd, a subsidiary of the Loviisa-based Eltete TPM Group, is building a factory in the city of Chongqing in Western China.
Chongqing has often hit the headlines as the largest city in the world in terms of population with 32 million residents. Eltete TPM's (TPM = Transport Packaging Materials) factory will be erected in one of the industrial parks located just outside the city. The factory will be built in two stages. In the first stage, about 5,000m² of factory space will be completed in spring 2013, and in the second stage, it is planned that a further 5,000m² will be ready in 2015. In the first stage, the Chongqing factory of Shanghai Eltete will manufacture about 5,000 tonnes of transport packaging material.
The main customers include the electronics industry and its contract manufacturers. In the near future, the region will produce almost 50 % of the world's laptop computers. Chongqing is one of China's four municipalities with the status of a province - the others are Peking, Shanghai and Tianjin. Chongqing's purpose is to lead the development of China's western part, so China's Central Government is investing large sums there.
Another interesting fact is that Chongqing plans to build 'direct railway connections' to the port of Rotterdam in Holland and to Rangoon in Burma. Like many other projects in China, these projects are mammoth in scale and you can only wonder at them. The city of Chongqing is also a port city, because from there it is possible to transport containers and cargo along the Yangtse River to the ports on the Yellow Sea and on to the Pacific Ocean, and soon there will also be direct rail connections to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The preliminary estimate of the time taken to travel by rail from Chongqing to Rotterdam is 20 days, but the date for the completion of the railway has not yet been announced.
Shanghai Eltete, a subsidiary of Eltete TPM Group which manufactures transport packaging materials, already has six subsidiaries in China, and the new factory will be the company's first production plant in Western China. A significant volume of industry has already moved and is still moving from the Shanghai region inland, because of labour shortage, growing labour costs and the rapid increase in general cost levels in the area of Shanghai. "The establishment of the Chongqing factory has nothing to do with transferring production. We are aiming to be local in a very large market area in inland China. Through the new factory, it will be possible to localise the production of transport packaging materials, which will help business to grow on the back of many global customers. In Chongqing, we are confident that we can achieve a turnover of about RMB 50 million (€6.2 million) fairly quickly, and certainly by 2015," says Bo Österman, CEO of Eltete TPM Group.