Bone china from Noritake

Invests Rs 300m for expansion:

Hiran SENEWIRATNE

Noritake Sri Lanka has spent more than Rs 300 million to up-grade their production facilities to meet the bone china production requirements.

“The investment include modern fast firing kilns, spray glassing machine, automated forming line and some new decoration machines,” Executive Consultant, Nimal Perera told the Daily News Business.

He said Noritake Sri Lanka was one of the companies to get permission to manufacture bone china dinnerware products outside Japan.

“Noritake has invested Rs one billion and the recent investment of Rs 300 million has enabled the company to be one of the best Noritake factories outside Japan,” he said.

He added that they manufacture White Porcelain and Fine Casual China. “Bone china production process has a completely different technique compared to white porcelain which has a soft biscuit dip glazing and reduction firing,” he said.

“The unique features of bone china products are its low weight, low thickness, high translucency and elegant look that has a big demand in USA and many European countries.”

He noted that the production cost of bone china is almost four times high compared to the regular white porcelain because of high quality, high value imported materials which are used for production and democratic processes.

“The company expects to manufacture and export 3000 bone china sets per year. Noritake management also hopes to expand and increase bone china production soon to cater to USA, Europe and Japanese markets,” he said.

“ Our turn over passed the Rs two billion mark last year,” he said.

Noritake Lanka expects to increase thier revenue by over 20 per cent with the introduction of bone china range.