Sankyo Tateyama Aluminium, Nachi-Fujikoshi to Expand Mg Sheet

Sankyo Tateyama Aluminium and Nachi-Fujikoshi announced on Wednesday they try to expand the magnesium sheet business to combined 10 billion yen in 3 years through the partnership in press processing and mass production technology. They expect the Japanese market will grow to annual 90 billion yen in 2010 from current 60 billion yen. They emphasized the synergy of their technology from upstream to downstream at press conference on the day. They start joint development effort in September 2005 after the partnership agreement in August 2005. They developed rolling mill and press processing technology. They succeeded the commercialization of sheet coil in March 2007. Sankyo Tateyama Aluminium succeeded to develop technology to improve flameproof performance of magnesium during castings without sulfur hexafluoride gas. Nachi-Fujikoshi succeeded to develop sheet coil products with 350 millimeters width and 0.2 mm thick through the new rolling process under precise controlled 200-300 degrees centigrade. They also succeed extrusion and press forming technology for magnesium. The process has 70 times better productivity and more than twice yield compared with traditional die-casting. They expect the new process, which enables to make larger sized products, could expand the applications including automobile transmission, door flame and oil pan along with larger sized laptop computer.