Flooding Keeps Fastener Factories in Thailand Closed
FEATURE
A month after massive flooding submerged Thailand’s industrial zone, the region remains inundated, forcing drastic measures on business owners to protect their investments.
“To retrieve important hard-disk drives crucial to his automotive fastener business, Takaharu Shinohara, a 39-year-old factory manager of ECF Precision Co., … dived into 2-meter-deep water at the still submerged factory site,” Japan Economic Newswire reports.
The diving operation took over an hour. Shinohara, a diving hobbyist, lead two professional divers from the Royal Thai Navy to help retrieve eight hard-disk drives, including two that stored all the templates for metal fasteners.
All the drives will be cleaned with fresh water before being sent to data specialists. Meanwhile, parent company Crown Screw Corp. of Japan intends to take over all the production until the Ayutthaya plant at Rojana Industrial Park can resume operations, Shinohara told the news service.
The 250 ECF workers reportedly were unaware of massive flooding in the region until it overtook the industrial complex on Oct. 8.
“It was Saturday evening and we were told to evacuate immediately,” an unnamed employee stated. “We managed to move some of our computers to storage on the second floor, but many were kept on bookshelves on the ground floor. We thought the flooding would be merely 50 centimeters high. But it turned out to be 2.5 meters.”
The flooding reached its 2.5 meter peak on Oct. 26 and took a week and a half to recede to 0.5 meter.
Despite the setback, Shinohara said the fastener operation, which has achieved average annual growth of 20%, will remain in Thailand.
“Some of the executives at our headquarters in Shiki city, Saitama Prefecture, have talked about relocating to India or Indonesia. But I personally believe it would be impractical since it is capital intensive and we have already invested a lot here.”
The monsoon flooding — the worst in decades — reportedly has inundated hundreds of factories and other manufacturing facilities, many of them owned by Japanese firms or supplying Japanese companies operating in and outside Thailand, as well as submerging thousands of hectares of farmland. The official death toll stands at 506, and more than three million people have been displaced or affected.
The flooding has hammered Thailand’s “key export industries and disrupted the global supply chain particularly in the automotive and computer hard-disk drive sectors.” ©2011 GlobalFastenerNews.com
A month after massive flooding submerged Thailand’s industrial zone, the region remains inundated, forcing drastic measures on business owners to protect their investments.
“To retrieve important hard-disk drives crucial to his automotive fastener business, Takaharu Shinohara, a 39-year-old factory manager of ECF Precision Co., … dived into 2-meter-deep water at the still submerged factory site,” Japan Economic Newswire reports.
The diving operation took over an hour. Shinohara, a diving hobbyist, lead two professional divers from the Royal Thai Navy to help retrieve eight hard-disk drives, including two that stored all the templates for metal fasteners.
All the drives will be cleaned with fresh water before being sent to data specialists. Meanwhile, parent company Crown Screw Corp. of Japan intends to take over all the production until the Ayutthaya plant at Rojana Industrial Park can resume operations, Shinohara told the news service.
The 250 ECF workers reportedly were unaware of massive flooding in the region until it overtook the industrial complex on Oct. 8.
“It was Saturday evening and we were told to evacuate immediately,” an unnamed employee stated. “We managed to move some of our computers to storage on the second floor, but many were kept on bookshelves on the ground floor. We thought the flooding would be merely 50 centimeters high. But it turned out to be 2.5 meters.”
The flooding reached its 2.5 meter peak on Oct. 26 and took a week and a half to recede to 0.5 meter.
Despite the setback, Shinohara said the fastener operation, which has achieved average annual growth of 20%, will remain in Thailand.
“Some of the executives at our headquarters in Shiki city, Saitama Prefecture, have talked about relocating to India or Indonesia. But I personally believe it would be impractical since it is capital intensive and we have already invested a lot here.”
The monsoon flooding — the worst in decades — reportedly has inundated hundreds of factories and other manufacturing facilities, many of them owned by Japanese firms or supplying Japanese companies operating in and outside Thailand, as well as submerging thousands of hectares of farmland. The official death toll stands at 506, and more than three million people have been displaced or affected.
The flooding has hammered Thailand’s “key export industries and disrupted the global supply chain particularly in the automotive and computer hard-disk drive sectors.” ©2011 GlobalFastenerNews.com
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