FEMCO Horizontal Boring Mill Boasts Four Key Strengths

● FEMCO group Chairwoman Chuang Hui-mei and her son, Special Assistant to the Chairwoman Liu Yu-chen, lead the management team to new heights.

New digital services at TMTS, echoing the company’s 75th-anniversary theme “Determined Sustainability”

At the Taiwan International Machine Tool Show, which opened on the 27th at the Nangang Exhibition Center, FEMCO subsidiary FATEK unveiled its new BMC-135HT horizontal boring mill, combining high load capacity, high torque, high precision and high rigidity, showing the strength of Taiwan’s leading horizontal boring mill brand. It also presented new digital services for its automated aluminum wheel lines and the BMC-135HT, including a glasses-free 3D display platform and AR-based maintenance and operation, an industry first in Taiwan.

FATEK was also the only company this year to receive the Silver Energy-Saving Label for machine tools for innovative software. The whole presentation echoed the 75th-anniversary theme “Determined Sustainability”, signaling a group that pushes forward against headwinds on its way to becoming a century-old enterprise.

When Chuang Hui-mei became the group’s fourth Chairwoman, the COVID-19 pandemic and post-pandemic trade changes were under way. She made determined reform and innovation the main theme, bringing new management thinking and energy to the 70-year-old company and uniting veteran and young staff to achieve strong results at home and abroad.

Liu Yu-chen notes that 2023 was a challenging post-pandemic year for manufacturing. Group revenue across steel, engineering and machine tools exceeded NT$3 billion, slightly below 2022, yet thanks to steady strategy, profit was higher than the year before, a rare achievement in a global downturn. Despite the machine tool slump, FATEK’s automated aluminum wheel lines and horizontal boring mills sold strongly in India, Turkey, mainland China and South Africa, and its 2023 revenue grew 25%, the envy of its peers.

In 2024 good news keeps coming from across the group. Liu says FATEK’s large VL-25M vertical lathe, once used for defense and shipbuilding parts, had been quiet in the domestic market for more than 20 years. With the government now emphasizing defense self-reliance, longtime customers have placed new orders and the production line will restart.

FATEK also benefits from Taipower’s grid resilience program, which requires large numbers of grid conduits and valves. FATEK’s FT-type horizontal boring mill is uniquely suited to machining them, and several sales projects are under way. Beyond its domestic lead, the horizontal boring mill is also in demand in the US, where the infrastructure act is driving purchases of machine tools for large components used in oil and gas and transport infrastructure; inquiries have soared and demand exceeds supply. FATEK’s market-leading smart automated aluminum wheel lines have also won orders for dozens of lines from Indian leaders such as MINDA and MAXION, filling its order book through the end of the third quarter.

Overseas, the group’s Pipes & Tubes division plans to supply square tube for factory construction in a 7,000-hectare industrial park development in Southern California. In line with green energy goals, 700 hectares will host several solar power plants, and FEMCO’s mature pipe manufacturing and integration technology could supply more than 100,000 tons of steel for solar panel mounting structures, giving the group’s future a strong boost.

The BMC-135HT shown this year uses a moving-column design, allowing a worktable load of up to 20 tons with better accuracy. Its core technology was developed with the Precision Machinery Research & Development Center: software compensation in the controller, based on a thermal deformation error model built from machine tests, delivers real-time thermal error compensation. Smart elements include patented chain-elongation detection for the spindle head counterweight, giving early warning so customers avoid downtime. The machine was well received at the show.

Source: Commercial Times

2024-03-27 · Commercial Times / Chuang Fu-an