Style Limited

Australian environmental flooring company, Style Limited (ASX: SYP), announced an innovative plan to expand its production base to other parts of the world with a unique transportable factory that mirrors its China manufacturing base.

The "mobile" manufacturing breakthrough follows a 12-month research program undertaken by Style in partnership with Flinders University's Molecular Technologies Research Centre in Adelaide, South Australia and partly funded by the Australian Federal Government.

The result is the development of a "transportable strand woven factory" that can be installed to existing wood finishing factories anywhere in the world to manufacture strand woven products using locally available soft wood species such as Poplar in the United States or Blue Gum in Australia.

Style's Chief Executive Officer, Mr Peter Torreele, said the partnership with Flinders University has now developed a model for an exportable and economically viable manufacturing cell to produce strand woven products outside of China, by designing an international block factory with a similar cost base to China due to advanced automation.

"The model has been designed to be an "add-on module" to existing wood flooring finishing factories anywhere in the world and we are in discussions with wood flooring manufacturers to form strategic partnerships for licensing of this patented technology, thereby creating a new revenue stream for the Company," Mr Torreele said.

Until now, strand woven products have only been manufactured in China because the existing manufacturing process - which is extremely labour intensive - has not been able to be replicated outside China due to raw material sourcing and manufacturing cost issues.

Style's highly automated international block factory will use locally available wood species anywhere in the world as input material, which will enable to manufacture and bring to market an entire new range of strand woven wood products, based on domestic soft wood species such as Poplar, Australian Blue Gum, Oak, Hickory, etc....

Melbourne-based Style is a world leader in "green" strand woven technology, and was the first company in the world to introduce strand woven flooring products in 2004.

Its original strand woven technology uses Chinese Moso Bamboo as a low value and fast growing "green" input material and transforms it into a solid floor that matches the strength and durability of a 150 year old exotic hardwood rival - thereby saving tropical forests and native hardwood plantations.

Style says this latest technological breakthrough will allow the Company to increase its global market share of the strand woven flooring market.

The Strand Woven segment has been consistently expanding its share, primarily at the expense of tropical exotics and is gaining main-stream appeal as the "green alternative to exotic hardwoods". This expansion is destined to grow even further as the cost of exotic hardwood continues to increase due to scarcity of resources and restrictions on logging and deforestation.

In addition, increasing consumer concerns over climate change is creating a vast "green building" market for sustainable design and construction products. Much of this growth will be in the commercial building sector - offices, retail outlets, and industrial and government facilities - as government policies provide financial incentives to developers to utilise "green" products.