Astro Engineering was one of the first bicycle-related Taiwanese investors in Vietnam. 25 years later Samuel Hu still has big ambitions to build bicycle frames faster and more efficiently.
By the turn of the millennium, most of the large players in Taiwan’s bicycle industry moved their volume-oriented production to China in order to remain competitive. But the founder of Astro Engineering, Samuel Hu, decided not to follow the herd – and after careful consideration, decided to invest in Vietnam’s Binh Duong province, just north of Ho Chi Minh City in Dong An.
Hu never regretted doing so, as Astro Engineering built a second, more modern factory further north in Kim Huy. While the original factory focusses on volume production of alloy frames, the newer factory also has a carbon frame department. Of its total staff of 3,500 Astro Engineering employs 3,250 in Vietnam, producing 90 percent of its frames in the country.
Reduced capacity due to the market slump
“From 2002 to 2022, both factories in Vietnam were running around the clock at full capacity. Due to the market slump we had to reduce our capacity, reverting to one shift and reducing working hours,” Samuel Hu recalls. “We consider ourselves lucky to be working with companies with a healthy business model that did not panic in the second half of 2022.”
Hu wants the industry to learn from the current issues to prevent a repeat of the overstock problems. He believes that production automation is a key way to achieving this – for both carbon and alloy frames. An in-house team of more than 60 engineers at Astro Engineering has come up with such solutions.
Astro Vietnam has installed a fully automated production line
Thermoforming is likely to play a major role in Astro’s future production arsenal. The company has already installed a fully automated production line at its Changhua headquarters to build frames from thermoplastic composite sheets reinforced with long fiber strands. One half of a frame is shaped at a time and then the two halves are joined seamlessly. Currently, Astro Engineering is working on a similar procedure that uses aluminum sheets.
One smart detail is that the raw frames feature excess material in the bottom bracket area, so the fitting interface and pattern of the bolting mounts for various mid-drive motors can be cut out later. “This means that production is not only more efficient, but also more flexible, moving the bicycle industry towards a lean just-in-time production of things that are in high demand,” Hu explains.
Astro’s Dong An factory is scheduled to be replaced by 2026. A new plot of land measuring 42,000 m2 has already been acquired, so this supplier can continue its way to an annual production of one million units.
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