TDConnex, a manufacturer of micro-precision components, has opened its sixth factory, an 800,000 square foot campus in Xiamen, China. The company says the plant extends its metal injection moulding output by more than a billion units a year, with automation at the centre of the design.

Metal injection moulding takes a mix of metal powder and binder, moulds it like plastic, then bakes and sinters it into a dense part. It is the technique behind small, strong, intricate components — hinges, camera housings, connectors — that are hard to machine and expensive to cast. TDConnex says the new lines can produce the smallest and most complex of these parts for premium consumer electronics, and that the site, combined with existing capacity next door, gives it one of the largest dedicated moulding operations of its kind.

A supplier's bet on the next device cycle

The company describes its model as hyperscale manufacturing, a phrase borrowed from computing and applied to metal parts, and says it serves global technology customers from operations in China, Singapore and India across more than 50 manufacturing capabilities. Opening a sixth plant of this size is a bet that device makers will need growing volumes of these components, and that they will want them from a supplier with capacity already installed.

What the announcement does not give is the capital cost, the number of jobs, the customers or a utilisation figure. Adding a billion units of annual capacity is only valuable if orders follow, and in consumer electronics the orders move with product cycles the supplier does not control.

The factory is a supply-side answer to a demand-side question, and the answer will be graded by what the plant is doing in two years rather than by its floor area on opening day.