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The first half of 2008 has again been very successful for Expocet with new major automotive business won in France. There are plenty of projects where we are fighting for business on behalf of our customer base. The market is very buoyant in the foundry industry particularly, but energy and raw material prices continue to be a problem.

Martin visited China in May again this year.

He revisited our old friends in the already well established foundry in Shandong province. The new automotive foundry is very impressive and as always the welcome was extremely warm and the meetings very constructive.

Martin also spent a short time at our new Chinese partner near Shanghai.

These two foundries produce excellent Investment Castings and provide a great partnership together with our Investment Casting Foundry here in the UK. We continue to provide castings to many varied industries both produced in the UK and by our Chinese partners.

Martin also visited  1.2 (China) Ltd  offices in Shanghai. Thanks again to Alex, Forrest, Michelle, Kelly and Lena for their help over the last few years. It was great to meet and discuss possibilities of extending the partnership between Expocet and 1.2 (China) Ltd on Tooling and Aluminium Pressure Diecastings in the future.

As we reported in January of this year a new extension has been planned by one of our clients to increase the capacity of SG, Grey Iron and ADI. The planned investment will increase capacity by around 30%

There has been good progress in the building work and installation despite the occasional bad weather.

The work should be complete in November 2008 and the foundry will come on production stream in January 2009. There has already been great interest in the extra capacity we can provide – not least because of the high quality and service we provide consistently.

Ben joined us here at Expocet in February this year as previously reported and is settling in well after his intensive training programme.

He has spent time at each of our customers’ sites and has really got “hands on” with some of the processes. We would like to thank all our customers for the time spent with Ben over the last few months during his training period. We are already seeing some great results from his work in a relatively short space of time.

Also a new experience for Ben was visiting a manufacturing exhibition in February with Fran. The large halls and exhibitors of the Leipzig manufacturing exhibition were most impressive. The visit to the DRUPA Exhibition in Düsseldorf also provided some new potential customer leads.

Ben continues to rapidly gain knowledge of the industries we are involved in.

We also wish Ben and Laure every blessing for their forthcoming wedding in October!!!!