New Jersey Molder Weiss-Aug Expands to Mexico

New Jersey custom insert molder and injection molder Weiss-Aug Co. Inc. has opened its first manufacturing facility outside the United States in the Monterrey metropolitan area of northern Mexico.

Weiss-Aug will invest $15 million in the Mexican company, Weiss-Aug México S. de RL de CV, over the next three years, General Manager Jorge Zamora Duque said June 23, a day after the opening ceremony.

According to Zamora, manual and semi-automated assembly operations started at the new 30,000-square-foot plant, which Weiss-Aug leases, on March 3. "We're planning to install three injection molding machines between October and December," he said.

The Arburg presses will have a clamping force of 200 tons each.

At the moment, up to 80 percent of the facility's output is for the medical and automotive industries, Zamora said.

"Our current production is 100 percent for the United States," he said.

The Mexican company has a staff of about 45, mostly women, and expects to employ up to 120 over the next three years.

Zamora, an industrial engineer, said "good infrastructure and good universities" were among the reasons Weiss-Aug chose to put the new operation in Apodaca. "Secondly, we know there's a lot of qualified labor in the area, and we are also close to the [U.S.] border."

According to the Weiss-Aug website, the company also supplies the electronics and semi-conductor industries.

Founded in 1972, Weiss-Aug's headquarters are in East Hanover. It has another manufacturing plant in Fairfield, New Jersey. Among its other services are research and development, prototyping, progressive die tooling, precision metal stamping, reel-to-reel molding and laser welding.