Fuchs Petrolub plans to start operation of its 36 million (U.S. $44.3 million) lubricants blending plant in Wujiang, a Suzhou district in Chinas Jiangsu province, in 2019, the German company said in its 2017 annual report.
First announced in 2016, the plant will replace its existing, smaller facility in Shanghai.
Qingping Zhu, managing director of Fuchs Lubricants (China) Ltd., said in the annual report that in the plants first phase, nominal production capacity will be around 100,000 metric tons per year, almost twice as much as the companys plant in Shanghai.
This factory will have eight highly automated filling lines, 31 blenders and 55 tanks with a capacity of between [18 tons and 450 tons] on 80,000 square meters of floor space, Zhu stated. The automatic high bay warehouse will have a capacity of around 11,000 pallets. High bay generally means a building with a high point of 12 meters.
Zhu said the new plant will use an intelligent plant concept, which means greater and more flexible production due to more automation, more effective material flows and optimized management processes. He claimed Fuchs will be one of the first lubricant manufacturers to use efficient automated storage and retrieval system technology in China.
According to the annual reports update, around 100 employees will work at the Wujiang plant in production, storage, maintenance, information technology, administration and other areas.
At the time of the initial Wujiang plant announcement in 2016, Fuchs said appealing factors about the site included favorable logistics, its location in the core of the Yangtze River Delta economic area and its status as a mature industrial zone and home base for other multinational companies.