India-based Vasantha Group, which focuses on technical moldmaking, has opened a facility in the Cincinnati area.
The company has invested more than $7 million and several years to acquire a facility in West Chester, Ohio, along with machinery and other necessities. Its U.S. operations will be conducted under the name VasanthaTech.
Varun Reddy, director of sales and foreign operations for Vasantha Group, said the company is expanding its global operations by bringing its expertise in high-cavitation, high-precision molds for the medical and packaging markets to North America. “We made the decision to expand to the USA in 2019,” said Reddy. “We hired a few key employees to start the process. … 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 managing advanced engineering at Imflux; prior to that, he was a manufacturing technical specialist at health-care 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, with up to 60 employees by 2028. In July, the Ohio facility, which will house a clean room, will take delivery of four Fanuc Roboshot molding machines, with clamping forces of 198, 242, 330 and 496 tons, for running trials on larger molds. They will join two Arburg machines that the company has for running LSR and micromolding applications.
