First board at Metro Ply Group in Surat Thani: Congratulations and good luck!
“We know each other, we trust each other” – this sums up the consistently positive cooperation between the Metro Ply Group and Siempelkamp. Metro Ply Group, one of the largest wood-based panel producers in Southeast Asia and the region’s largest particleboard producer, operates a total of four particleboard plants (three made by Siempelkamp) and five MDF plants (two made by Siempelkamp).
They are located in Sai Noi/Nontaburi, Kanchanaburi and now Surat Thani, Thailand’s eighth largest city.
The current project includes the forming and press line including a ContiRoll® in 8' x 40.4 m format, a cooling and stacking line and a board intermediate storage. Siempelkamp subsidiary Büttner supplied the dryer and the energy plant. Pallmann, the size reduction specialist in the Siempelkamp Group, contributed the size reduction machines. Siempelkamp’s Belgian subsidiary Sicoplan took charge of planning the entire plant. True to the motto “We are Siempelkamp,” everyone worked side by side not only for the customer, but together with the customer: “During the assembly and commissioning, we and the team from Metro came together to grow into a single team. For all of us, the focus was on achieving the same goal, and we succeeded in that,” says Torsten Kengels, project manager at Siempelkamp.
The particleboard plant was built from May 2022 as a greenfield project including a completely new infrastructure. The region around Surat Thani has the greatest number of rubberwood plantations in Thailand, so the raw material for the new plant will be fed from this abundance. As in the three previous projects, the cooperation and communication between the partners was professional and harmonious.
“All of the systems that we have supplied to Metro over the past 20 years have yielded top performance to the full satisfaction of our customer. Our fifth project is also on the road to success and will be approved in the next few weeks. We congratulate the Metro team and sincerely hope that the new plant will further strengthen Metro’s first-class reputation as one of the ‘top leaders’ in the Thai wood-based panel industry,” says Marc Müller, Head of Commercial Sales at Siempelkamp.
