The opening ceremony of the new Kozai plant was held on 29th August 2019, with the Governor of Kagawa Prefecture and Mayor of Takamatsu City in attendance.
It has been built on a 200,000 m2 plot of industrial land in the western Kozai district of the port of Takamatsu, purchased from the prefectural government in November 2016 after the core Shido plant had reached full capacity. Kozai will produce rough terrain and truck cranes; along with the Shido plant, it will increase production for export markets to support Tadano’s long-term goal to become No. 1 worldwide in the lifting equipment industry with 80% of sales outside of Japan. It will also produce booms and cylinders for Tadano operations worldwide.
The coastal location means large cranes can be transported directly to Kobe Port for shipment outside Japan.
Tadano has invested more than ¥20bn in the new plant, which covers 47,000 m2 and has around 100 employees. Tadano sees six attributes required for resilience to sudden demand changes: extending capabilities, being lean, flexibility, diversification, agility, and quality improvement. The new factory has been built to support all these aims. The design is based on the concept of ‘Next Generation Smart Plant’, with clean and simple production lines, minimized environmental impact, reduced contamination, more robots and more use of electronic data storage.