Taiwan's Fair Friend aims for world number one machine tool maker

In the UK, Fair Friend is represented by the Engineering Technology Group, Southam, Warks, which is the sales outlet for the Taiwanese firm's Feeler brand. Fair Friend aims to achieve the world number one spot by investing more than £106 million to build plants worldwide and set up a research institute in Taichung City, central Taiwan, while, in addition, it has signed an industry-academic cooperation agreement with the Tunghai University in Taichung. Fair Friend is to give £34,000 to the university and provide automation equipment to support research by professors and graduates in pursuit of more automated manufacturing to meet the challenge of labour shortages in both Taiwan and China. The group is also expanding its production base in both Taiwan and China, with it budgeting to spend almost £60 million on establishing four machine tool plants in China by the end of this year. In addition, Fair Friend is said to be budgeting more than £25 million to set up headquarters and a plant in the Taichung Precision Machinery Park, central Taiwan, which will start mass production during the third quarter of 2012 to focus on high precision vertical machining centres and grinding machines, with the aim of generating more than £76 million in annual sales. (Taichung is home to many of Taiwan's machine tool makers.) In addition to that, in the north of Taiwan, at the Sanyi Industrial Park in Miaoli County, it is to set up a factory that will focus on double-column machining centres, aiming to create machines to the value of more than £20 million/annum.