Nippon Light Metal to Launch Thai Heat Exchanger Plant

Nippon Light Metal announced on Monday the firm builds new plant to make heat exchanger for room air conditioner in Thailand for 800 million yen starting shipment in October. The firm tries to meet growing demand for air conditioner in Southeast Asia when Japanese air conditioner makers expand the local operations. Nippon Light Metal targets 2 billion yen of sales in 2012 and4.5 billion yen of sales in 2015 for the new plant.

The firm builds the new plant on the land in Chonburi owned by the group company. Nippon Light Metal already started the construction of the plant with annual 200,000 units of production capacity in December 2010.

Room air conditioner demand increases in Southeast Asia recently while the area was export base of room air conditioner for Europe and other areas. The demand will increase in the area when room air conditioner penetration is still less than 20% in Thailand.

Air conditioner makers seek higher valued heat exchanger with better energy saving and efficiency while the users try to avoid to use volatile copper tube. Nippon Light Metal makes aluminium parallel flow type heat exchanger at the new plant with technical support from Nikkei Heat Exchanger, which is the joint venture with Modine Manufacturing of USA.