Taipei, Sept. 13, 2011 (CENS)--Fair Friend Group, Taiwan’s leading manufacturer of machine tools and industrial machines, aims to become the world’s largest manufacturer of machine tools by 2018, by investing over NT$5 billion to build plants worldwide and set up a research institute in Taichung City, central Taiwan, as well as having signed an industry-academic cooperation agreement with the Tunghai University in Taichung.

Fair Friend will donate NT$1.6 million to Tunghai University and provide automation equipment for research by professors and graduates, aiming to develop automation technologies to elevate manufacturing skills.

Jimmy C.Y. Chu, chairman of Fair Friend Group, says labor shortage in Taiwan and China offers opportunities for Taiwan’s automation machine-tool manufacturers, adding the group has been setting up machine-tool plants in each of past few years. For instance, the group will budget NT$2.8 billion to establish four machine-tool plants in China by the end of this year.

The group has budgeted NT$1.2 billion to establish an operating headquarters and a plant in the Taichung Precision Machinery Park, central Taiwan, which will start mass production sometime in the third quarter of 2012 to focus on high-precision vertical machining centers and grinding machines to generate over NT$3.6 billion in annual sales.

The group has procured 36,000 square feet of land to build a plant in the Sanyi Industrial Park of Miaoli County, northern Taiwan to focus on large, double-column machining centers to create NT$1 billion in annual production value.