Canadian producer moves manufacture into China to keep costs down, quality up
By Liz White, editor
Shen Long now a world leader in goalie sticks for ice hockey
A hot factory near Macau, on the Chinese mainland west of Hong Kong, may seem an unlikely location for making sticks for a game played only in extremely cold climates - ice hockey.
But Shen Long Composites Manufacturing in Sanxiang, part of the industrialised sprawl that makes up Zhongshan city, in Guandong province, is now the exclusive producer of goalie sticks for Canadian supplier Sher wood, said Joseph Hsu, owner and ceo of E-Z's Win Co. Ltd, which owns Shen Long.
The Canadian company has passed all its goalie stick equipment and know-how to Shen Long, Hsu explained, in a 17 Sept interview at the Sanxiang site.
This relatively small Chinese operation - 2011 revenue was $25 million, and it employs 800-900 people - uses leading technology, making high-tech composites using epoxy-resin-infused carbon fibre.
For the goalie sticks, which have wider blades and lower shafts than standard players' sticks, Shen Long moulds a rigid PU foam core onto a carbon fibre shaft.
After trimming, the foam is covered with layers of carbon fibre fabric, to produce the required strength.
Sher wood used this PU process for about seven years in Canada, Hsu said.
Shen Long has made parts for Sher wood for 10 years, and in 2011 the Canadian group decided to ask the Chinese business to produce all of its goalie sticks.
Sher wood has now moved its Cannon PU dispensing machine to China and closed its facility in Canada, giving the Chinese producer a "certain period of exclusivity," to make Sher wood brand goalie sticks. These have been well-received in the market, Hsu said.
Foam helps cut weight
Since an ice-hockey goalie's defensive stick is much bulkier than the players' sticks, lightweighting is crucial.
Hence the development of the PU foam core, which forms the wide part of the stick and blade.
Originally, blades and shafts were made separately and joined together. "Our new technique is to make the shaft and mould the blade onto it, so that it is in one piece," said Hsu.
Moulding of PU onto the stick is carried out as a stand-alone operation, with the urethane resin injected into a mould containing the handle. Once demoulded, they are left for 7 days, before skilled technicians apply four layers of carbon fibre/epoxy fabric to either side of the PU core of the blade, overlapping them at different angles (see pic below).
They next apply a film to give a good surface finish and the whole is moulded in one of six presses for nine minutes.
After another two days, the sticks go for trimming and finishing.
To make the shafts of goalie and players' sticks, staff use carbon fibre material produced in-house and cut to size (about 10 by 150 cm). They expertly build this up layer by resin-infused layer on a mandrel to form a tight roll, eight or ten layers thick.
The mandrel can then be pulled out, and the workers place the roll in a heated mould to form the squared-off shape of the stick, at 200 tonnes pressure, with air injection to keep the shape.
On the top floor at Shen Long is what Hsu sees as "the heart of the process:" production of the resin-infused carbon fibre sheet. Staff feed tapes of carbon or glass fibre from bobbins through a comb system, to keep them straight and aligned, and onto an epoxy-resin coated plastic film.
Once the film and fibre layers have been calendered together, they are rolled up for supply to the production departments.
The company still imports the PU system for the blades from an Austrian company, in order to keep to the specifications that Sher wood used.
But it is likely to source the system locally eventually. Hsu said the company has plenty of time to change the material as production develops. It imports carbon fibre from Japan mostly, at present.
Shen Long has 150 000 parts in stock, and each month ships 4-5 containers of sticks to Canada.
Light, strong, balanced
Ice hockey sticks used to be made of wood, and could weigh up to 1.2 kg, Hsu said.
Use of carbon fibre and PU has cut the weight of the goalie sticks to as little as 700g, Hsu said.
Sher wood's best-selling players' stick is the TrueTouch, at 480g, while the T100 weighs only 450g.
Hsu stressed that lightness is not the only criterion: "Precision, balance and strength are important as well," he said.
Sher wood is one of the strongest suppliers of goalie sticks, selling about 100 000 or 150 000 a year in a global market that could be about 250 000 units a year, Hsu said.
Labour costs crucial
Compared to Canada, China has the advantage of cheaper labour, but Hsu firmly believes its plant management and product quality is also superior.
Optimum quality control is possible in China, because Shen Long has the staff resources to operate this well, Hsu indicated.
In Canada, the ability to do this is restricted by the fact that staff pay is so high, with take-home income in Canada six or seven times higher than in China, at say $2500-$3000 a month, compared to Chinese rates of $400-$500 a month.
Hsu is now considering moving production inland, where labour and land costs are still much cheaper, now that the coastal regions of China are so developed.
Hsu's company was originally Taiwanese and moved to China 12 years ago to take advantage of lower rents for facilities - a third or even a quarter of those in Taiwan, as well as lower labour costs. Now, labour costs have risen and are perhaps six times what they were then, while wages in Taiwan have stagnated or even dropped, Hsu said.
