MTA Vietnam: Helping manufacturers innovate

Before starting my journey around the exhibition I spoke to the event organisers, Singapore Exhibition Services (SES), to get some background on the event and what was on offer at this year's MTA 2012. William Lim, SES's Project Director said that since its humble beginnings in 2005 MTA had grown from strength to strength, and with this year's record turn-out, it looks like we'll be around for some time to come. In response to my question relating to the changes he had noticed over the last seven years William pointed out that, "since 2005 we have noticed a movement towards high end, state of the art machines making their way to Vietnam, which indicates a very discerning market, and although manual machines are still represented, there is a lot more interest in fully automated systems using state of the art technology. The changes here have been quite massive, and that I think in proportion it's very reflective of the state of the Vietnamese manufacturing industries".

Behind Singapore and Taiwan, Germany had the largest representation of companies at MTA 2012, and the interesting fact that has always impressed me about the European companies is that a lot of them have already been operating in the region for a many years, and have well established client bases and sales/service representation in Vietnam. One such company that I visited on my journey around MTA 2012 was Zoller, a German manufacturer of tool presetting and measuring machines, and tool management  solutions. In our world of globalisation and multinational companies, it is becoming more and more unusual to find a family owned company operating in these global markets. Zoller is a third generation family owned business that caters to a number of industries that demand a high level of measurement accuracy in manufacturing, Industries such as the automotive, aerospace and the military industries.

Joern Bock, the Business Development Manager for the Asia Pacific region said that most of their machines are designed or customised to meet the specific needs of the customer which is supported by software tailored to their manufacturing requirements. Zoller has been operating in Asia for almost 12 years and have their region's head office in Shanghai China, and have recently expanded with setting up offices in India, Japan and Thailand. All Zoller products are manufactured in Germany with their Asian operations only focusing on sales and service. Joern said that although their operations in Vietnam are still relatively small, he sees great potential for growth over the next two years, particularly as a number of their international customers are
considering setting up operations here in Vietnam.

An area of technology that has seen incredible growth over the past 30 years, and has found its way into so many areas of manufacturing is lasers technology. Whether it's for cutting, drilling, measuring, welding or laser marking, it's hard to find any area of manufacturing that does not increasingly rely on this ever developing technology. One company I visited at MTA 2012 who have been working with lasers for over 35 years was Rofin Laser Marking who produce a number of products used in industrial materials processing such as, CO2 lasers, solid-state lasers, fibre lasers, diode lasers, and various q-switch lasers.

Thorsten Ferbach, Rofin's Sales Manager for the Asia region said that Rofin's presence in Vietnam has been increasing over the past five years asVans Old Skool Grise