After working for 10 years off shore in the P.E.T. bottle manufacturing industry, Steve Morrison returned to New Zealand to evaluate the viability of setting up his own production company.
After a market study it was concluded the everyday, large volume, single design P.E.T. bottle market was well catered for. However, there was a requirement for high quality, custom design bottles for medium volumes.
In October 1997 LinkPlas was formed and Steve flew to Japan to select and order the latest technology machinery to target this market. On returning to N.Z. premises were leased in North Shore City. In December 1997 Linkplas' first machine was commissioned and the company was off to a flying start.
It was recognised that one of the barriers to introducing custom designs in the NZ market would be tooling costs. Steve, utilising his mechanical background, modified the machinery and tooling design to allow for versatility of tooling sets to minimise costs for new projects.
2004 was a big year for LinkPlas, winning Gold, Silver and Bronze at the New Zealand Plastic Industry Awards.
In 2005 LinkPlas took out top honours by winning the Enterprise North Shore Business Excellence Supreme Award. Also in 2005 LinkPlas moved premises from Wairau Valley to a state of the art facility in Albany. Due to ongoing expansion and new developments, the LinkPlas operation doubled the size of the factory and raised the bar for packaging standards, this included an atmosphere controlled packing room for finished product.
Again 2006 was a successful year for LinkPlas, taking out the Supreme Award at the New Zealand Plastic Industry Awards and one of our products won Best Bottle at the prestigious 2006 bottledwaterworld Design Awards in Italy.
2007 was LinkPlas’ 10 year anniversary with great celebrations to be had and further machinery was installed.
Today, LinkPlas is in production 24 hours, 6 days a week with more than 60 different bottle designs. Our customer base is now more than 100 different businesses, many who are substantial NZ Companies or multinationals. To secure a large number of these customers innovative new designs and products were required.
According to Japanese machinery supplier, Aoki, LinkPlas “is now the fastest growing high technology P.E.T. facility in New Zealand” and we are now able to cater for large volume runs with our new high speed machinery.
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