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to China |
Karlstad, Minn.,
company Mattracks expands production to China Mattracks, one of northwest Minnesota's major employers, is expanding production overseas with the construction of a 500,000-square-foot plant in China's Zhejiang Province. Once completed in July, the $12 million plant would be five times the size of the company's Karlstad, Minn., plant, its first and only plant until now. The new plant would employ 250 to 300 workers with plenty of room to grow. Employment at the Karlstad plant is more than 50 and general manager Dean Gorder said Friday he expects it to get higher in spite of the expansion to China, which he said was driven more by market-access issues than labor costs. He said Karlstad would still retain all existing product lines and research and development functions. Zhejiang would get a new product line, which he would not reveal for competitive reasons. Mattracks, founded in the early 1990s, makes a variety of triangular track assemblies designed to replace conventional wheels and tires on ATVs and trucks, granting the vehicles better off-road capability. The site of its new factory, Zhejiang Province, is on the coast south of Shanghai, China's financial and industrial center. The province has a reputation as a rapidly growing manufacturing center. The new plant, the company said, would help the company expand further into the international market, broaden its product lines and support vertical integration goals by letting the company "gain control over the production and quality of many of its component parts." Gorder said the plant's location inside China is itself a significant advantage with that country's huge emerging consumer market. A map of Mattracks' presence worldwide on the company Web site shows its products are in use everywhere from Saudi Arabia to Antarctica, with a conspicuous absence in China. But Gorder said manufacturing in China would allow the company to reach out to other countries, particularly those in the European Union, which has higher trade barriers with the U.S., but not China. "China is one of the places where the world shops these days," he quipped. Mattracks has been making strong in-roads into the overseas market for some time and this year may mark the first year in which international sales exceed domestic sales.
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