Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, December 28, 1993 TAG: 9312280071
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The company, which makes solid-state chip capacitors for integrated circuits, plans to add 200 people to its work force of 300 within two years. Sixty of the new people should be hired by the end of March, said plant manager Bill Johnson. The average worker at Vitramon earns $6.75 an hour.
Vitramon's capacitors, which are made by baking alternating layers of metal and ceramic materials in a high-tech process, range in size from one-eighth-inch square down to the company's newest product, a tiny one-thirty-second inch by one-sixty-fourth inch - "about the size of a large grain of sand," Johnson said.
The Roanoke plant shipped about 1 billion capacitors in 1993 at an average price of 3 cents each and plans to expand shipments to 2.5 billion in 1994. For shipment, the capacitors are attached to a plastic tape and wound on reels resembling movie film.
The solid-state capacitors store and regulate power on electronic circuit boards.
Vitramon holds about 18 percent of the $400 million capacitor business in the United States and has about 25 percent of the European market, he said. The Roanoke plant exports capacitors to the Far East, but the European market is supplied by the company's plants there.
The Roanoke plant has had three years of solid growth and is looking for a fourth, Johnson said.
Vitramon's three largest competitors are all Japanese, he noted, and the company has not made any effort to pierce the domestic market in Japan.
While passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which will lower tariffs gradually among the United States, Canada and Mexico, should help the Roanoke plant, the passage of the global General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade won't, Johnson said, because duties on the plant's exports to the Far East are not high now. NAFTA, on the other hand, makes Mexico a more attractive place to market the company's capacitors but a less attractive place to manufacture them, he said.
The company looks on itself a service-driven supplier, Johnson said. "We're not the low-priced guy, and were not the high-priced. We tend to do well with customers who have very high expectations of their supplier."
All segments of the company's business have done well recently except for sales to the military, Johnson said. The plant's workers put in a lot of overtime in the fourth quarter, and business is good enough that the usual six-day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day production schedule will be expanded to seven days a week in January, he said.
Ford Motor Co. buys 25 percent of the Roanoke plant's output. Other major customers are Chrysler Corp., Motorola Inc., AT&T and Northern Telecom Ltd.
What would the world be like without Vitramon's capacitors, Johnson was asked.
"Think what life would be like without semi-conductors," was his reply. There would be no touch-tone phones, no airbags in cars, no personal computers or most other modern technology.
Johnson, a 20-year veteran of the capacitor business who has been with Vitramon 10 years, supervised construction of the Roanoke plant five years ago. That's when Vitramon sought to expand its U.S. production and looked south from its Monroe, Conn., headquarters because of high land prices and low unemployment rates there.
The company looked at sites in every state from Maryland south, evaluating such factors as work force, air service, quality of life and electric utilities, Johnson said. Transportation was not a big factor, because the company's product is so small and easily shipped.
Vitramon also operates plants in Connecticut, Brazil, England, Germany and France. It considered expanding production in Mexico or Singapore, but decided to enlarge the Roanoke operation after winning a $350,000 state grant and $150,000 city grant for site preparation.
Before Christmas, workers with J.M. Turner Construction Co. of Roanoke were putting the final wrap on parts of the new addition. The building itself cost between $5 million and $6 million and the manufacturing equipment to be installed added another $15 million to $17 million to the capital investment, Johnson said.
In addition to manufacturing space, the expansion includes a second employee cafeteria and offices for the engineers.
The expansion should increase the plant's yearly capacity to about 3 billion capacitors, enough to meet customers' demands for three years.
Vitramon is a subsidiary of Thomas & Betts Corp., a Bridgewater, N.J.-based electrical and electronics company with more than $1 billion in sales last year.
by CNB