A deal with “a major electric car company in Northern California” is poised to spark substantial growth in revenue for a Garden Grove-based manufacturer of high-performance polymer products.
The Saint-Gobain plant, built in the 1990s, generates $75 million in annual sales from three business units—performance plastics, which makes seals for the aerospace and oil and gas industries; Furon pump systems for the semiconductor industry; and Sani-Tech, which focuses on piping that transports high-purity water for dental offices, medical centers and labs.
This year it added a fourth unit—automotive glass—which, once up and running, will nearly triple the company’s revenue to about $200 million, according to Plant Manager Sigrid Valk.
“Having multiple [business units] within the site will help us with any future cyclic issues,” she said of the decision to further diversify product lines. “We are trying to be more strategic in how we grow.”
The addition materialized via Saint-Gobain, a 352-year-old building materials firm that started out making mirrors for the Palace of Versailles in Paris, and more recently glass for the Statue of Liberty and the new World Trade Center, seals for the International Space Station and the Mars Curiosity Rover, and architectural fabric for the Dallas Cowboys football stadium’s retractable roof.
Its North American division in Malvern, Penn., reported sales of approximately $5.8 billion last year. It employs more than 14,000 at 150 locations, including an automotive glass plant in Cuautla, Mexico, operated by sister company Saint-Gobain Sekurit. The factory needed help, and Valk said yes.
The unfinished windshield and roof components products will be shipped to Garden Grove for “value-added manufacturing” before heading to their final destination, presumably Tesla Inc.’s factory in Fremont.
“We’ll be adding spacers, connectors, all pieces needed for installation,” she said. “You can’t package as densely when that’s all connected, and cost for freight is a lot higher when you don’t have as many pieces per container.”
Investment
The launch of the business unit includes a $2.6 million investment to expand warehouse space by 30,000 square feet, improve manufacturing flow, and update front-end offices “to make it a more hip place to work.” New, “collaborative” robotic technology will cost another $3 million. At capacity, production volume will be 4,200 sets a week.
Initially, Sekurit was “looking for a place to inventory some glass,” and the manufacturing component wasn’t part of the deal.
“I had a number of machines we weren’t running anyways, so we just got rid of them,” said Valk, adding that opening the space led to optimizing existing manufacturing lines, a process that included “value stream mapping and lean manufacturing methodology.”
The city helped streamline the permitting process, and manufacturing should commence by year-end.
Lacy Construction in Anaheim is building the additional warehouse space, and Archetype International in Irvine helped design it.
The Tesla deal will also enable Saint-Gobain to add about 60 workers in Garden Grove, boosting its total to 280. The company took the usual route to attract talent, unlike its parent—back in 1665, founder Nicolas Dunoyer started out by “kidnapping two glassmakers from [Venice] to bring them to Paris to make glass for them for Versailles,” she said. Lesson learned: The Venetian glassmakers refused to reveal the secrets of their manufacturing process, and were replaced two years later by Richard Lucas de Nehou from Normandy, a man credited with making mirrors that have adorned the famous Gallery at the Château de Versailles since 1684.
“Saint-Gobain is one of the oldest corporations in the world,” Valk said.
Saint-Gobain hopes its partnership with Tesla is also a long run. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the electric-car maker, plagued with low production rates, plans to open a manufacturing plant in Shanghai, China. It employs about 10,000 in Fremont.