Japanese textile maker Toray Industries and Daimler will jointly set up a company in March in Germany to make and sell automobile parts using carbon fibre reinforced plastics.
The joint venture will start supplying carbon fibre components for Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz passenger vehicles to be launched in 2012, according to Kyodo News. Last spring, Toray and Daimler formed an alliance to cooperate on the development of carbon fibre components.
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Carbon fiber reinforced plastics have been drawing industry attention as their lightness and strength can help the fuel efficiency of vehicles, but the time-consuming work required to produce the materials is a drawback, the report noted.
The joint venture came after Toray and Daimler succeeded in developing technology to mass produce such components in a short time.
”We intend to accelerate our approaches to other automakers,” Shinichi Koizumi, an executive vice president of Toray, told the news service.
The new company, to be headquartered in Esslingen, will be capitalised at EUR825,000, or about JPY95m, with Toray holding a majority stake of 50.1% and Daimler 44.9%. The remaining 5% will be held by other investors.
