T

oiletries company PT Mandom Indonesia, a subsidiary of Japanese Mandom Corporation, will start the construction of a new factory this June in an attempt to cope with growing demand in the country.

Mandom Indonesia said on Tuesday that it had awarded a construction contract worth Rp 390 billion (US$40 million) to PT Kajima Indonesia to build the cosmetics plant on a 148,000-square-meter a plot of land in the MM2100 Industrial Estate in Cibitung, West Java.

The construction is expected to be completed in December 2014. The company said it would use internal funds and bank loans to finance the construction of the new plant.

Mandom Indonesia said that it planned to construct the new plant as one of its existing plants located in Sunter, North Jakarta, no longer had space for further expansion. The company has another plant in the MM2100 Industrial Estate.

When the new plant is completed, Mandom will relocate its Sunter factory to the MM2100 Industrial Estate.

“The current process of plastic packaging is dispatched from Cibitung to the Sunter Factory for the filling stage. Finished goods are sent to the logistics center in Cibitung. After the relocation, this process will run more efficiently since all factories will be located on the same industrial estate. Besides that, several points were taken into consideration such as the flood-prone Sunter Factory area and the transportation congestion level,” Mandom Indonesia president director Takeshi Hibi said.

The new plant is part of the company’s attempt to reach Rp 3 trillion in total sales by 2016. Mandom Indonesia currently produces various toiletries, including men’s hair treatment products branded Gatsby and other segmented products such as Pixy, Pucelle, Lovillea, Miratone, Spalding and Johnny Andrean.

Mandom Indonesia reported a 12 percent growth in sales to Rp 1.85 trillion in 2012 from Rp 1.65 trillion in 2011. The main contributor of the growth were sales of fragrance products, which grew by 15.7
percent to Rp 490.76 billion in 2012.

Despite two digit growth in sales, the company’s net profit rose by 7.4 percent to Rp 150.37 billion in 2012 from Rp 140.04 billion in 2011. Its 2012 financial report showed that a loss from a decline in the value of inventory of Rp 21.75 billion, which was an 80 percent surge compared to a similar loss in 2011, contributed significantly to the lower increase in net profit.

Hibi said that the company targeted to reap Rp 2 trillion in sales this year.

— JP/ Raras Cahyafitri