Calendaring business stares down China, blinks

With its local market suddenly awash in Chinese imports, Brazilian PVC calendaring operation Sansuy SA Indústria de Plásticos decided that, if you can’t beat them, don’t compete against them, and realigned its business to serve value-added products.

Below the Sansuy logo printed in black lower-case typeface, the glossy corporate brochure features four images—water, a forest, the sky, and soybeans—which are encircled by the phrase “preserve the environment, providing well-being,” in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Toshio Nakabayashi, CEO of Sansuy SA Indústria de Plásticos, pushes the brochure across the conference table, noting that when his company decided against competing with China three years ago, it shifted its business focus on four areas: water, environment, food, and energy. “This is the cycle of sustainability,” Nakabayashi explains, pointing to the images on the brochure. “They’re all linked.”

Described by Sansuy director Tony Brito as the “Chinese phenomenon,” the wave of Asian imports that swept through the Brazilian signage industry several years ago flipped local producers’ share of the domestic market from 80% to 20%. “We preferred to go to value-added products,” Brito explains, a decision that brought about the polyvinyl chloride (PVC) calendaring operation’s new corporate strategy in the second half of 2007.

Under the realignment, the company’s markets now include agribusiness, mining/sanitation, and civil construction, in addition to more traditional segments like signage, automotive, and transport. More recently, Sansuy has developed calendared PVC for biodigestors (pictured) that turn animal waste at industrial farms into captured methane gas, biofertilizers, and renewable energy, mirroring Nakabayashi’s “linked” vision. The company also creates covers for sewage-treatment-station (STS) ponds that eliminate ambient odor and capture biogas from the waste.

Sansuy has two plants in Brazil, a 50,000m² facility in Bahia built in 1979 and a 33,000m² operation near São Paulo, which started up in 1966. The site that MPW visited is located in Embu, about 30 km southeast of the city of São Paulo. Off the main door, PVC pellets from state petrochemical giant and Sansuy’s part owner Braskem are sent from below the ground floor to the third level. There, material is compounded to the proper formulation, with plasticizers and additive packages mixed in.

Once mixed and melted, the compound is dumped by an automated gaylord between two large mixing rollers, creating a layer of still-pliable vinyl around the roller. A worker cuts material off the rollers, feeding it back in for additional mixing, with the rolls themselves heated to 140°C-180°C.

From there, the PVC is sent to a second mixer and then an extruder, where a conveyor feeds the laminator vinyl in a ribbon that oscillates back and forth. Finished sheets are produced as wide as 1.4m in Embu and up to 2.2m wide in Bahia.
 
The plants in Bahia and Embu have two calendars and four laminators apiece. Except for the calendar systems, Sansuy builds, designs, and maintains all the equipment in its plants, including a four-color rotogravure printer, through an in-house industrial engineering department.

Adjacent to production is a 1000m² fabrication area where, in various stages of completion, Sansuy was finalizing big bags that can hold up to 2000 kg of material, truck covers, and water tanks. The water tanks range in size from 600-18,000 liters, and on the floor a worker checks for leaks along the seam of a 10,500-liter tank bound for Saudi Arabia.

Next to the main building and across an elevated catwalk is Sansuy’s R&D and quality-control lab, consisting of four large rooms separated by windows. The lab is part of Sansuy’s ongoing efforts to use technology to tap value-added markets at home and abroad. The company is a member of Brazil’s Export Plastic program and generates 10% of its sales from exports. Within Brazil, it sees tremendous potential as well.

“We see the plastics market growing in Brazil,” Brito says, noting that given the country’s vast size, the actual consumption of plastic in Brazil is quite low. “We see a big opportunity for Brazil to incorporate more plastic in everyday life.” —Tony Deligio