Ensuring excellent extruders

IN 1985, three young apprentices in a foundry shop struck out on their own and started Hup Sheng Machinery in a garage in Melaka in Malaysia. They offered repair and maintenance services to begin with, and they moved to a shop once their small business started growing. Eventually they were able to set up their own factory for snack food processing and packaging machineries.

From its humble beginnings, Hup Sheng has expanded to three factories and is now a major Malaysian exporter. Its business  consultant, Sim Tong Him, took some time off from his busy election campaign schedule to tell us more about the company and its products.

What are your product lines?
We produce food production machineries that can be used to make items such as flour snacks, cereals, instant noodles, and prawn crackers. We produce whole assembly lines of machinery from fryers, cookers, burners, seasoning machines, cooling machines, dryers, right down to packaging machines. Usually we sell the whole assembly line but we can also sell the individual machines just by themselves.

Extruders are usually the heart of the processing line, but not all assembly lines have them. We have differing types of extruders. Our H.S Extruder can produce crispy snacks from different types of flour in shapes such as shell, wheel, screw, tubes and chips. We also have direct expansion extruders for processing breakfast cereals, snacks, health food, instant food and even pet food. And we have hydraulic vertical extruders  for snack pellets of uniform length and thickness, with optional dies for producing different shapes such as star, ring, and stick shapes.

What are the selling points of your machines?
It is hard to match high - end machineries like those  produced in Germany, Italy and Japan. But compared to  countries like China, Taiwan  and Indonesia, we can definitely match their quality and in certain areas we are even better. Our machineries are many times cheaper than similar machines from the more advanced countries and our regional competitors  cannot compete with us in terms of our quality,  specifications and aftersales service.

How do you ensure quality of machines that you produce?
Our own engineers and technicians take care of quality control in the various sections in the manufacturing site. We also do some tests before we certify that a machine meets our standards. Only then do we put it in the market. We are very serious about ensuring product quality.

Do you provide aftersales service?
We state clearly in the sales contract that we provide maintenance and aftersales service. Once the machine is sold we do onsite testing at our clients’factory and we send our technicians and engineers to train their staff.This is how we guarantee continuous support for our products. This helps us get recommendations and repeat buyers.
 
What are your markets?
We cater to some major companies in Malaysia like Oriental, Carjen and Perfect Food, and some of them we have been working with for many years. We export about 60% of our products  –  we  have supplied to companies in Bangladesh, Viet Nam, Indonesia, Singapore and Australia. In the last few years, we were also able to sell our machinery to the Middle East, such as Yemen and Dubai.

We produce customised machineries and we  have patented designs that we can also modify to suit  individual requirements. We have attained ISO and Moody International certification, as well as various awards for  our products and business.

Where do you source parts and raw materials?
We are very particular about our suppliers of raw materials. We are prepared to pay moreAir Max