“For the last few months [the global automotive market] was very hard but customers are moving back to production and some are thinking about new machines,” said Klaus Haaub, sales manager at Weissenburg, Germany-based Ossberger.

“I’m pretty convinced that Asia will be first and Europe and America will follow. But I don’t know about the USA; it seems to be the Latin American market that’s coming back,” he said.

Haub added that there is a clear trend in the U.S. for automotive component production to move to Mexico or even further south.

While that trend may not be good news for U.S. manufacturing companies, it does present opportunities for machine makers and he hopes to benefit from that. “Some will move their machines but the majority will buy new machines,” he predicted.

Ossberger operates in a niche sector of the blow molding industry. Its Pressblower machines are used in the automotive sector to produce bellows and boots. It also retains a strong position in the packaging sector with systems for lower volume production of tubes.

European Plastics News is a sister publication to Plastics News.