However, one company which opened its factory in Suzhou, near Shanghai, in May 2006 certainly does not fit that stereotype. BLP puts quality before price in its high-end cabinet doors for kitchen, bedroom and bathroom furniture. With its main and well-established manufacturing base in Doncaster, Yorkshire in the UK, and a UK furniture industry history dating back to 1910, BLP’s shareholder directors (the company was the subject of a management buyout in 2000) started to think seriously about building a factory in Asia back in 2002. Originally the directors targeted the south of China – heartland of the Chinese furniture industry – and considered a joint venture there with a Hong Kong-based partner. “We then carried out more investigations and visits around China and felt that the Shanghai area felt more ‘business-like’, with a good infrastructure and better levels of spoken English and a better attitude to business,” said group technical director Philip Cole, whose father’s business, Stanley Cole of Wainfleet Ltd, brought its Predor brand membrane-pressed doors to BLP in 1998. “In this area we identified Suzhou and Ningbo as possibles [for the factory] and we negotiated with both local governments.” The final decision was in favour of the ‘High-Tech’ industrial complex in Suzhou and BLP became one of the first companies to commit to this large development zone.
“At the time, we received some assistance in terms of the land price and some tax incentives from the local administration on the basis that we had a high-tech manufacturing process,” said Mr Cole. However, the subsequent companies located in the zone are generally manufacturers of high-tech products and the deal that BLP was able to strike would not be possible today.
In the meantime, the BLP management had realised quite quickly that although they had those potential business partners in Hong Kong, the overall business culture in Shanghai was different and they would be better off going it alone with a 100%-owned subsidiary, making the whole process less complicated. So that is exactly what they did. The factory stands on a site of 150,000m2 with the factory, warehouse and offices occupying around 60,000m2, though with plenty of available factory space not fully utilised today.
The company, BLP (Suzhou) Ltd, employs around 750 staff, including office workers, and operates 24 hours a day, six days a week. One major challenge to any skilled enterprise in a new country is to find the right location for the factory, but a bigger challenge can be to find good, competent staff. “Harbin, Qindao and Guangdong are the traditional furniture areas in China – this area is not,” said Mr Cole. “But we believed the people here were more interested in learning and in the technology and were especially interested in foreign-owned businesses. “We went to labour fairs, we talked to the labour bureau and we had an office in the ICBC Bank in central Suzhou for over a year. We dedicated a lot of this time to visiting other factories in the area and trying to learn more about the culture – and we learnt a lot of lessons.”
So why leave the security of a UK factory and venture into the unknown? “We wanted to grow the business and we didn’t feel we could do that in the UK or western Europe. We either had to move to a lower-cost area in Europe, ie eastern Europe, or to China. We felt that China’s speed of development offered a potential market for our products going forward. Currently we supply nothing to the domestic market here – most goes to the UK and the US, but the Chinese consumer economy is growing fast.”
Mr Cole admits that costs are now rising in China and that he can see a time in the future when it will be less competitive. “Things are changing but labour rates have not risen dramatically against our predictions and we are in fact less labour intensive here than in our UK factory.” That may seem a surprising admission, but the technical director pointed out that automation is less likely to produce damaged components, as well as being more efficient. “We automate here to gain efficiency; one automates in Europe to save money.”
Ultimately the Suzhou factory is capable of producing 500,000 cabinet doors a week although it was producing around 200,000 at the time of my visit in March. The company plans 300,000/week by the end of next year and 500,000 by 2010. There are two product lines at Suzhou: membrane-pressed doors; and five-piece doors made from profiled, foil-wrapped MDF components. Raw MDF panels enter the factory and all processing is then carried out under one roof. It is a totally European machinery operation at BLP China, with turnkey machinery installations throughout. “We have had very good support from the machinery manufacturers, with good service and if they do need to send an engineer from Europe, one is on an aeroplane very quickly,” said Mr Cole.
Main machinery suppliers include SCM Group of Italy (with offices and service centres in China), Wemhöner (with its own factory one hour’s drive away), Koch of Germany and Barberàn of Spain. The company employs seven or eight full-time ex-patriot staff, including the managing director Ian Cohen and his son Jason, who takes care of administration. Dean Borrington is general manager and Christine Hutton is a New Zealander who has worked in China before and is the financial officer. The quality of the raw MDF is crucial for BLP’s quality image for its doors and currently most of its MDF comes from Asia-Pacific and European manufacturers, to the tune of 1,400m3/week.
“That figure will double and we are continually evaluating new suppliers,” said Mr Cole. However, he finds that some of the potential Chinese suppliers are not prepared to make the effort to modify their product to suit BLP’s requirements in spite of lengthy discussions with them, which seems strangely short-sighted given the volumes involved now and, potentially, in the future. Shive content, mouldability and homogeneity are important qualities for BLP’s base panel, especially in the moulded cabinet door range. The membrane pressing line starts with raw MDF in full-size panels. There are three Gabbiani panel saws – two angular plants and one single beam, all with automatic panel handling systems. These cut the panels into component sizes. Next come two edge-profiling lines by Stefani and two double-end moulding lines for square or profiled ends, with profile sanding. A third line is planned in the space alongside. At present, there are seven routing machines for those panels requiring moulding and these were supplied by SCM Ergon.
“For most customers we drill the doors for hinges and handles, for which we have two automatic and three manual lines,” said Mr Cole as we toured the works. In one of the few non-automated operations in this factory, the edges of the panels which are to be membrane-pressed are manually sprayed. The four membrane presses themselves are made by Wemhöner Surface Technologies of Germany. Three of them are 4.8x1.8m and the fourth is 4.8x1.5m. The three larger presses are to accommodate some wide foils that BLP uses. The 1.5m press has been specially equipped to produce high-gloss foil doors, having a positive pressure air chamber to ensure a clean pressing atmosphere. The adhesive for the faces of these panels is sprayed automatically and dried, all in Cefla glue application lines.
These prepared panels, carried on trays, then have the appropriate foil sheet applied to the surface automatically and are fed into the membrane press, using the full width of the bed. All four presses are fitted with the Wemhöner-patented Variopin system to support the panels during the pressing process. After pressing, the panels are removed with a suction lift and the trays return to the beginning of the press line.
Edge trimming of the foil on the finished panels is another of those few jobs which is carried out by hand. All panels destined for membrane pressing are bought in faced with melamine on the reverse side, either in a wood grain or plain colour, and there are 10 different decors in the range. The actual melamine facing is carried out either by the panel manufacturer, or by a sub-contractor. For the five-piece door production, where cabinet doors are made just as a solid wood door would be, the process begins with a Paul multi-rip saw. The profiles are produced in 8ft to 12ft lengths, wrapped and then cross-cut to length.
Barberàn machines wrap the ‘strips’ of MDF which make up the framing stiles and rails of the five-piece doors and they are then edge-banded on the ends, drilled to accept jointing dowels and those dowels are inserted. This is all carried out in one line, made by Koch. There is a flat laminating line for applying the decor foil to the faces of the centre panels of the doors. The five-piece doors are hand assembled and side-pressed to produce the finished doors, which can then be packaged in cardboard and labelled with the customer’s information if required. In the large warehouse, orders are assembled for containerisation in the loading bay.
Extraction for BLP’s factory was supplied by Lignar Engineering of Singapore and Moldow supplied the filters. The energy plant/boiler were supplied by Mawera of Austria, while all the ductwork was made locally in China. The 3-D membrane pressed door range produced by BLP in the UK or China is known as Predor, while the five-piece doors are branded Prodor. They are used in furniture for the bedroom, kitchen or bathroom and demand is growing fast. The company claims that the addition of the Suzhou facility makes it the largest manufacturer of these kinds of cabinet doors globally. Speaking about the Chinese venture, BLP’s group sales and marketing director Barry Berman said: “It has been a challenge, with the culture and the language being two of the main areas. The country is also renowned for its cheaply-produced goods, but our quality is our selling strength. We are a European company offering European quality, as well as design. We will not compromise our standards for a lower price”.

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