“We broke ground last month and will be doubling the capacity of our plant in Chartres, France, to 50,000 square feet [about 4,650 square meters],” said Brian Payson, vice president of business development for Nypro Healthcare. That expansion will include a clean room and is scheduled to be completed next March.

In addition, Payson said Nypro is doubling the size of its Suzhou, Jiangsu province, medical plant to 2,800 square meters, with that expansion scheduled to be completed by year-end. That expansion is just the first phase of a longer-term plan to “double our manufacturing footprint in China in the next two years,” he said.

“Asia continues to be where we put a lot of our energies because our customers are manufacturing there,” he said in an interview at the Medical Design & Manufacturing East show, held June 9 to 11 in New York.

Payson said sales growth for the company’s fiscal year, which ends June 30, will be roughly 6 percent compared to 9 percent the year before. The Clinton, Massachusetts, company is projecting organic growth of 7 percent for fiscal 2010.

However, he said that Nypro has “several acquisition targets in the works right now” that could boost overall sales growth. “We are still extremely strong financially, so we can take advantages of opportunities that could be better priced than in years past.

“We want to increase our offerings, our infrastructure in Europe,” Payson said. “We are looking at acquiring companies with technologies we may not possess, particularly in the area of drug delivery and diagnostics. We can get into markets faster if we acquire an established infrastructure, an established engineering infrastructure.”

Payson said Nypro is continuing to evolve, with an emphasis on offering customers whatever services they need.

“At one point in time, we were all about precision-molded parts,” Payson said. “But now 60 percent of our revenue is directed from services and solutions we offer after our parts are molded. Our customers ask us to do everything from design to tool building to production and distribution of their parts to end markets. That is a huge shift and we see it growing more and more each day.”