Phone components and airplane landing gear built in Sri Lanka
European based telecommunication companies embed transformers and inductors manufactured in factories in Ratmalana, Sri Lanka? Absolutely … the next flight you take could ensure a safe landing because the gear is manufactured here by a company named Etal that has been carrying out operations for the past 10 years.
Etal Group Pvt Ltd General Manager Scott Robinson told the Business Times in an interview last week that the BOI company believed that Colombo was an ideal location in terms of logistics and shipping and they also have a good quality workforce from the factory floor to the design department where engineers from local universities are hired to join in.
He pointed out that 50 per cent of the total demand of Etal’s sales are manufactured out of Sri Lanka mainly for the European market and now India has also opened up to buying from Colombo since the company started its own operations here. Colombo is the base that manufactures about five million units of production per year.
The factory floor comprises mainly of a female workforce who are operators and are generally considered flexible and committed in carrying out some of the tedious operations even by hand as well, Mr. Robinson said. However, Sri Lanka has to import its raw materials in order to manufacture the inductors and transformers, it was pointed out and these mostly are brought down from China.
Etal has a presence in China as well and in this respect Colombo is faced with a clear challenge in terms of increased costs to import the raw materials and manufacture them in order to compete in terms of cost which is approximately seven per cent of the total production cost, Mr. Robinson said. Some of the manufactured components are used in aeroplane landing gear, deep sea fishing radar systems as well, he said.
Colombo is the largest unit in the Etal Group with 360 employees with a larger amount of the production volume is mainly for the telecommunication companies in Europe. The operations in Estonia has about 60 employees where they manufacture for the military and defense sector. Etal initially started its operations in Colombo more than 10 years back with a sub contractor but had subsequently set up their own operations in the country due to the viability of having operations here.
“It has been a slow and steady build and now we are looking at transferring the design work which was previously based in Sweden to the Research and Design Centre in the UK,” Mr. Robinson explained. He noted that Colombo based engineers would offer their input to the centre from the Asian capita and moreover the shifting of the R&D centre to the UK was also due to the fact that the company’s President is based there.
Since the Colombo operations began 10 years back, the company had set up a second manufacturing plant. “We had a steady increase in demand for our products,” he said adding that the company is always on the lookout for new acquisitions to expand their client portfolio. China and India are the company’s customers as well and the sales workforce operates out of Sweden, the UK, and India with an office in China to check on quality and logistics.
The Colombo based manufacturing facilities located in Ratmalana commenced operations in 2008 and has capabilities that include manual and automatic fine wire winding and among other the it fully cover the manufacturing requirements of a wide range of standard and custom designed inductive components and assemblies.?