Kawasaki & Kobe Steel JV for Crushing Equipment in Full Swing

 The marketing and design portions of Kobe Steel and Kawasaki's crushing machinery businesses have been transferred to Earth Technica Co., Ltd. with manufacturing to follow next year. Sales in the midterm future are anticipated to grow to 30 billion yen per year.

 Kawasaki and Kobe Steel, Ltd. signed the final agreement to merge their crushing machinery business into a 50/50 joint venture in February after the two companies entered into a basic agreement and began working on the details of merging last October.

 The joint venture was established on April 1, 2003 and began operations in July. With headquarters in Tokyo, the company has sales offices throughout Japan. Earth Technica has about 120 employees and paid-in capital of 200 million yen.

 Kawasaki and Kobe both hold leading positions in Japan's crushing machinery market, and the merger has complemented the respective product menus of the two companies. Both also market products in the environmental field. Consolidating overlapping functions and products, in combination with specializing production has increased the profitability of the joint crushing machinery business while strengthening the growing environmental business.