Mould maker Avenue Mould (Sligo / Ireland; www.avenuemouldsolutions.ie) is to provide technical support in Europe for Ace Corp Holdings (Hong Kong / China; www.acemold.com) after the two companies entered an agreement in October. The cooperation will initially be confined to production trials, although it is expected to embrace service, overhauls and mould validation in the future.

Avenue Mould has 35 employees and annual sales of EUR 5m. It specialises in the design, manufacture and validation of multi-cavity injection moulds for high volume applications in the medical device and pharmaceutical sectors. It has four Netstal machines and one Demag unit with a maximum clamping force of 2,400 kN for trials. The company has twice been voted mould maker of the year in the UK and has been a finalist five times. Its latest innovation, which is about to be launched, is a 192-cavity tool.

Ace has 2,400 employees and sales of USD 80m. These figures include both Ace Mold and Ace Plastics, an injection moulding company with 150 machines. The cooperation with Avenue fits well with Ace’s business model. At the beginning of 2008, it signed a cooperation agreement with KraussMaffei Technologies (Munich / Germany; www.kraussmaffei.com) on the development of two-shot systems for high-volume applications such as packaging. Ace Corp Holdings is currently building up Ace Packaging to manufacture cosmetic packaging. The new systems are being designed for this company.