On April 7, Air Water completed and started to operate a new engineering base of industrial gas plant and equipment which had been under construction since before in its Sakai Office.

  As improvements are expected in the quality of products and　services as well as operating speeds by means of integrating the scattered functions of development, design and maintenance in addition to the doubled production capacity, Air Water aims to empower its competitiveness in the domestic electronics market and also to enhance further competitiveness abroad such as North America and India upon which the company has recently been putting focuses. Taking advantage of such circumstances, the company plans to bring up next-generation engineers who are able to work globally. 

  President Ryosuke Matsubayashi said, “Our corporate target now is to enhance responsiveness of the domestic electronics field which is now busy to make large-size plants and expansion works represented by Generative AI and to push up our business scale to 100 billion yen by reinforcing the industrial business in India and America. We believe the Global Engineering Center as a base to materialize the strategy. Concretely in terms of hardware, we will create a synergy effect by integrating into the new base the offices of AW Gas Products, AW Mechatronics and AW Engineering which have been operated in Osaka Prefecture. At the same time, we are going to redevelop the shipping facilities to enable a speedy shipment of completed products directly from the wharf to ships to serve quickly overseas customers in a better way.  In terms of software, we have modified our system to get operation data of overseas plants at the renewed remote control aid center (now controlling about 150 facilities). So that we can be ready to feed back the daily operations and technical developments in this country. By enhancing the collaboration with AW America and AW India, we will develop a system to obtain cost merits for procurement.” 

He added saying, “These investments have a different objective from those of capital investment for plants. In the industrial gas field of our key business, it is difficult to create difference in the quality of products and we have to depend on manpower to create differences from our competitors. We would like to make the most of such circumstances in which we can learn a series of works related to engineering. We are going to proceed actively with personnel exchanges at home and abroad.”   

The new base building is 6-storried having a floor area of 6000m² for office and 5655 m2 for plant. The plant area is about 1.5 times larger than the existing one. There is no change in the main product lineup. As for the ASU air-separation plant, hydrogen generator and LNG supplying facilities, we continue to produce cryogenic storage tanks at Fukushima Works (Koriyama, Fukushima Pref.) and LNG tank trailer and CN-related equipment at Ishikari Plant (Ishikari, Hokkaido) respectively.

In addition, Air Water took measures to reinforce disaster preventing such as raising the bottom floor of the ground floor in the office building and also to obtain “ZEB Ready” of the government authorization which is granted by saving energy by 50% or more by introducing high-efficiency facilities. The investment for them is about ¥6 billion.