TMPC Co Ltd is based on a side street in the city of Taichung, around an hour south of Taipei on Taiwan’s west coast.
There is little about the exterior of the business to reveal its history or the hard work behind its success. Inside, a number of CNC machine tools are busily producing parts for a variety of customers around the world.
Two decades ago, TMPC owner Hardus Coetzee arrived in Taiwan from South Africa as part of a government-sponsored educational initiative. “I was one of 23 people who came to Taiwan to learn how to be instructors — teaching locals with no prior education. I thought it would allow me to use my skills as a trained fitter and turner in the South African Air Force, which I had joined after leaving school.”
Little did Mr Coetzee know when embarking on the three-month instructor course that one of the English-speaking Taiwanese translators would become his wife.
“Unfortunately, Frannie was fired once it was discovered that she was seeing one of the students. I finished the course and returned to South Africa, then came back to Taiwan about a month later. Frannie and I were married within four months.”
Finding a steady job was not easy. Mr Coetzee initially tried his hand as an English teacher, but that only lasted a month. He longed to get back to machining, but two subsequent spells as an employee at local CNC companies lasted seven and eight months respectively.
He even tried to start his own CNC business, but the venture came to a halt after 18 months due to his lack of knowledge of local business customs and practices. The same thing also counted against him in his next venture — buying and selling goods — because locals speaking a language alien to Mr Coetzee, who was then 25 years old, often took advantage of him.
“It was then that I went to a second-hand machine tool dealer in an attempt to resume cutting metal for a living. I asked the owner if I could use the machines to make parts, in return for which I would pay a piece rate.
This arrangement meant that whenever the dealer had a potential customer come along to look at machines, they would be seen working. He was sceptical at first but eventually agreed and started to sell more machines as a result. Unfortunately, he then got greedy and wanted to charge me more, so I stopped.”
Bold venture
Almost at the end of his tether, Mr Coetzee pooled all the money he and his wife could lay their hands on and borrowed a little more from friends to buy his first “modern” machine — a Taiwanese-built mill.
With help from a Frenchman who spoke fluent Mandarin and made his living sourcing parts in Taiwan for overseas companies, Mr Coetzee secured his first customer — a go-kart specialist in North Carolina. TMPC Co Ltd was properly on its feet, and the Coetzees finally had a future ahead of them.
With more orders coming in, Mr Coetzee added two turning machines and was operating his machine shop 24hr a day; he would work 16hr, then his wife would take over while he slept in an adjacent room.
Soon after, an acquaintance asked the husband-and-wife team if they could make large roller components for the wood-working industry; they subsequently machined around 600 parts in the first month. However, the on-going ‘finder’s fee’ he had to pay his acquaintance made the job unprofitable, so once again he stopped production.
“The end customer contacted me and we worked around the issue without landing my acquaintance in trouble; I’m happy to say that we continue to make rollers for them to this day. It was then that I began to wise up in business and be a little more cautious in my dealings.”
Mr Coetzee had soon accumulated an armory of 20 machine tools and was working harder than ever. New orders came from the optical-lens industry, as well as from makers of electric cars — in the case of the latter, to produce as many as 12,000 gearboxes a month.
New premises
With more and more orders also arriving from the roller customer, TMPC clearly needed a bigger facility and better machines. The moment had arrived to expand again; this also coincided with him ‘discovering’ Haas CNC machine tools (
www.haascnc.com).
“My first Haas was a DT-1 Drill/Tap Centre; and because of me, I know of at least two other companies near here that have invested in Haas products in the past six months. I now have three Haas machines: a DT-1, a VF-2SS Super Speed vertical machining centre, and a VF-4 VMC, which was bought to machine the rollers. We are now planning to buy a fifth-axis unit for the VF-4.
“On the VF-2SS, I do a lot of prototyping, because it is so fast. The machine is easy to set up and is ideal for short-batch production. I make around 100 different 3-D machined parts on the VF-2SS, which runs 17hr a day, every day.”
Other parts he makes on the VF-2SS are carburettors for ‘racing lawnmowers’; produced for a US customer, these feature many small holes and are produced in less than 2hr. “The same part takes 5hr on one of our Taiwanese machines,” says Mr Coetzee.
Despite the high-volume output at TMPC, nothing is rushed to the detriment of quality. “Many people are wary of ‘Made in Taiwan’. I suggested to one particular UK customer that I make him some moulds free of charge, to see if he was happy with the finished product; he was.
"Just because we are based in Taiwan does not mean our customers get poor quality. For new customers, I don’t charge; I let them try us first. That’s how we get a lot of our business.”
In May 2012, Mr Coetzee’s hard-won success allowed him to pay off his US$2 million bank debt in its entirety. He also began working fewer hours, allowing others to take some of the day-to-day responsibility of running the business.
These days, the only job he does himself on the shopfloor is machine programming; he employs others to do the tool setting and machine operating. In total, the company has a staff of 14. TMPC is poised once again to move to bigger premises, as well as to achieve ISO certification.