Hyderabad, India-based Vasantha Group has opened a facility in the Cincinnati area, specifically West Chester, Ohio, to expand the company’s global operations and establish a foothold in North America. VasanthaTech is the name of Vasantha Group’s new US operations, which will focus on serving the company’s core strength of building high cavitation, high precision molds for the medical and packaging markets.
Varun Reddy, director of sales and foreign operations for Vasantha Group, said the company has made the move to the US to bring its highly technical moldmaking expertise to North America. The company has 650 employees worldwide.
“We made the decision to expand to the US in 2019,” said Reddy. “We hired a few key employees to start the process, and since then we’ve invested over $7 million to acquire a facility, machinery and more. We are now ready to move forward building our business in North America.”
Industry veteran Shawn Schnee is CEO of VasanthaTech. He joined the company after working as manager of advanced engineering at iMFLUX; prior to that, he was a manufacturing technical specialist at healthcare giant Ethicon, Inc. “We have 20 people here now, but this is just the beginning for us,” he said.
Reddy said after the initial $7 million outlay to start the business, Vasantha plans to invest another $15 million to grow the North American business over the next five years. He anticipates having up to 60 employees working here by 2028.
Stocking Up on Machinery and Equipment
The VasanthaTech West Chester facility has four new Fanuc Roboshot molding machines coming in July, which will help the company run trials on larger molds. The new machines will be 180, 220, 300 and 450 metric tons. They will join the company’s two Arburg machines for running LSR and micro-molding applications. A new Class 8 clean room for medical molding applications also is coming this summer.
Andrew Cummings, sales manager for VasanthaTech, joined the company this past January after working in top sales and product management roles at Mold-Masters Ltd. and Zahoransky Automation & Molds. He said the value that Vasantha’s new US facility provides customers includes the ability to run mold trials and provide complete customer support for Vasantha molds, right here in the US.
“Cincinnati is a great location for us and our customers,” he said. “We build development and pilot molds here, typically one or two cavity tools, to prove the concepts; then the high-cavitation production tools are built in Austria or India. The finished molds are shipped to our Cincinnati location, where customers can visit to see them for trials before they ship to their destination. All our customer support and mold trialing for our customers takes place at our Cincinnati location.”
In addition, VasanthaTech handles all the logistics of working with the Austria and India locations to manage the project and have the finished mold shipped to the US. “We make it as easy as possible for our customers to get their molds delivered from overseas,” said Cummings. “It can save them a lot of time and hassle.”
Cummings said that VasanthaTech will be exhibiting at NPE2024. “We can’t wait for NPE, it should be a great show for us,” he said. Without giving away what they’ll be showing, he said the company will have several molds in operation at its booth and other companies’ booths at the show.
Global Growth
Most recently, Vasantha Group has started a new automation venture, Savya Automation, with locations in both India and Austria. Savya will provide full-scale injection molding automation, including end-of-arm-tools (EOATs) and applications including part handling, transport, sorting, boxing, etc. “Savya has been added to achieve our goal of providing turnkey solutions, with Vasantha taking full responsibility for a project in its entire scope,” said Manfred Schinko, CEO of Savya Automation and VTW.
Vasantha’s VTW operation in Austria was formed from former KTW employees, a division of Husky. When Husky proposed shutting down the facility, the employees found Vasantha Group as an investor, which they then invested 20 million € into a new facility in 2020 and named the company VTW GmbH which resides in Waidhofen/Thaya, Austria.
V+ Solutions is Vasantha’s engineering hub, based in Freiburg, Germany. Led by Michael Schmidt, V+ provides complete engineering support for Vasantha’s customers worldwide, designing the most innovative production solutions that optimize production. Schmidt joined Vasantha in 2022 after a long career at Zahoransky Automation & Molds GmbH, where he most recently was managing director of sales.
For more information, visit www.vasantha.com.
