Now, alongside its washing-machine factory in Qingdao, there rises a pharmaceutical plant, whose synergies even Haier's bosses seem at a loss to explain.
And Whirlpool's washing-machine factory now makes appliances under contract for Kelon, which sells them under its own brand, a reversal of the usual hierarchy between western and Chinese firms.
The results at Maytag--300 layoffs in the past 18 months and warnings last month that the flagship laundry machine factory is in deep trouble--have sent town leaders on a desperate scramble to secure a new economic lifeline.
Meanwhile, he grabbed an old thread-rolling machine out of a nearby factory and wired it to operate very slowly to let him observe exactly what was happening.
When Wessely started the business with one stitch-bonding machine in the shell of an old toweling factory in 1999, he found pretty good demand for "multiaxial reinforcements"--they're strong, stiff lightweight cloths used in boat hulls and construction materials.
The factory s other equipment, including a machine that pastes solder and another that dispenses glue, can make a product within 24 hours of getting the plans.
But then, in a Mitsubishi factory, he came across a British machine-tool salesman who told him that Japanese workers were getting three times as much out of their machines as their better paid British counterparts.
By 2003 he'd added a machine, along with four more workers, but his factory was still dark on weekends.
Manufacturer Brother, which says it has made 5.9 million typewriters since its factory in Wrexham opened in 1985, has donated the last machine to London's Science Museum.
The machine tools allegedly sold by the Italian firm, Olivetti, to a Soviet aeronautics factory where they were used to build the YAK 41 fighter-bomber.
The last one to be made in a factory in Britain rolled off a production line in Wrexham - 183 years after a machine was patented as the first typewriter.
Masayuki Okano has a factory in Mukojima, a section of Tokyo's Sumida ward that is jammed with small machine shops.
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