Jowat GlobalJowat Inside
Stories

A Strong Location

Originally founded in 2000 as a sales organization for Malaysia and Singapore, it quickly became clear how important Jowat’s strategically located subsidiary in Malaysia could be to the enterprise. More than 20 years later, it is now one of the fundamental pillars of Jowat SE in the Asia-Pacific region.

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Just five years after the sales organization, a Malaysian production company was founded with a focus on manufacturing water-based dispersion adhesives. To keep up with the growing demand, in 2009 the sales organization and the manufacturing companies were brought together under one roof at a single, larger facility. At the same time, hot melt adhesives were added to the production portfolio. In 2015, the two branches of the company were merged to form Jowat Manufacturing. Yet even with the capacity this gave them, it wasn’t long before more resources were required to cater to the demand for optimum bonding solutions in the local Asia-Pacific market. Over the course of just 14 months, a new manufacturing site was built in Bandar Enstek. The opening ceremony was held in 2015, and the plant provided a significant boost to capacity for hot melt adhesive production, adding reactive hot melt adhesives, solvent-based adhesives and water-based primers to the portfolio. Bandar Enstek is one of Jowat SE’s most modern manufacturing locations, and is now home to a multi-cultural team of around 120 employees.

More Than Just a Subsidiary

Jowat’s Malaysian location is surrounded by booming markets, and can effectively serve as a hub for all the enterprise's activities in the Asia-Pacific region. The in-house production facility enables Jowat to cut both lead times and the administrative burden. Dr. Ralf Schelbach, vice president for Asia-Pacific, has been stressing the importance of the location to Jowat since as far back as 2015: “Malaysia is not an extension of our workbench, but an independent location and bridgehead, where we are also undertaking product R&D in order to provide the highest level of satisfaction for the requirements of local customers.” Those requirements extend far beyond geographical and cultural proximity and a common time zone for easier communication with customers, and also include the ability to cater to specific requirements in areas where the local market differs from the European one. All in all, Jowat Manufacturing is a success, as demonstrated by its ongoing growth. “Our focus was originally on the Asia- Pacific region,” says Managing Director Willi Wiens, “but more recently we have also been catering to the markets in South America, Africa, Russia and Turkey.”

Upholding Established Quality Standards

The new markets also open the door to new product categories to be researched and further developed in Bandar Enstek. Here too, geographical and cultural proximity provides an advantage, as Willi Wiens explains. “As the long arm of Jowat SE, we are able to overcome linguistic and organizational hurdles more easily by virtue of our local presence.” Despite the location's distance from the enterprise's headquarters in Detmold, its customers know that there is one thing they can rely on: “When it comes to our technology, products and process quality, we are a fully integrated part of the Group, so everything we do is in line with the long-establish Jowat quality standards.”

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