Sumitomo Metal Mining to Reshuffle Paste Production Sites

Sumitomo Metal Mining restructures production bases of thick film materials. The firm transfers production line of commodity grade pastes including resistive paste and resin paste from Ome plant in Tokyo to Chinese subsidiary in order to consolidate the commodity grade production into Shanghai subsidiary. Ome focuses the resource mainly on competitive nickel paste for multi layered ceramic capacitor. The firm already started the gradual transfer completing in 2011 along with approvals from the users.

The firm has integrated production chain from nickel resource to paste. The firm produces nickel powder at Isoura plant in Ehime. With the nickel powder, other plants including Ome plant and Dongguan Sumiko Electronic Paste in China. The firm tries to expand the nickel powder sales mainly in China when the users of capacitor makers try to follow growing Chinese market.

The firm tries to expand the sales of resistive paste, which is used for chip resisters on printed circuit board, and resin paste, which is used for conductive adhesive of light emitting diode, in China. The firm decided to transfer the production of such commodity grade products into Shanghai Sumiko Electronic Paste to improve the cost competitiveness.

After the transfer, the firm produces commodity grade products at Shanghai plant and nickel paste at Ome, Dongguan and Malaysia plants. The firm eyes nickel paste production at Shanghai plant depending on the demand while the firm studies potential production of silver paste for white LED at Ome plant.