Five years ago
Jens Szymanska
Founder and CEO at LATEXFOAM TECHNOLOGY B.V. and FIVEHUNDREDMILLIONTONS.COM Out of the Box, Entrepreneur, Open-minded
Five years ago, I published an article on LinkedIn with the headline "Time for Indonesia to lead in rubber processing" (link below). What happened since then?
Based on my assumptions from 2015 not much has changed:
- The climate change still taking place
- Indonesia take small steps in processing rubber (or latex) and some are in the pipeline
- Smallholders as well as state-own plantations still suffering because of the low rubber price (in fact the price is lower than in 2015)
The government lately announced to buy raw material for 8.2 million dollars direct from the farmers. For that money we from LATEXFOAM TECHNOLOGY can set-up a state-of-the-art factory with newest technology. Such a factory would have a yearly consumption of around 4.000 tons latex and an additional Export profit of a few Mill USD per year. This is all the more interesting because our technology does not depend on gas as energy source and is not affected by the high price of gas like the glove industry for example.
Indonesia has huge rubber plantations across and it would be pity if the state-owned companies like PTPN and other private estates would be unable to deepen their value chain by increasing the consumption of local latex. Good agriculture practise is very important to sustain high productivity. While downstream industry should be persistently developed, too, to get additional value.
LATEXFOAM TECHNOLOGY intensify its connections in all rubber countries since 2015 to find a partner for a fully integrated latex foam factory with newest technology and standards. We still believe that Indonesia has great opportunities to become a leading nation in this industry, even if Vietnam, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Thailand have been in the lead for some time, the more so our team will be on site to monitor every detail and guarantee success.
Lately we strengthened and intensified our collaboration with the Research Centre for Rubber Technology in Bogor, which may become our preferred partner for our ongoing R&D activities in developing further new technologies and products. As a first step we will help them upgrading their formula and the product quality.
https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/time-indonesia-lead-rubber-processing-jens-szymanska/
By the way: It takes around five years until a rubber tree can be tapped for the first time. What we will talk about in 5 years?