“The Warwick plant has a great history of making high-quality products. Unfortunately, it also is a very high-cost plant that has a cost structure that is almost twice as high as Xerium’s low cost plants due to several key factors including: pension and benefit costs, machine uptime, productivity, and a declining local-market business. The machine clothing business is mostly build-to-forecast wherein customers order ahead of time, thereby allowing for servicing of the demand from low cost facilities. Several of Xerium’s competitors provide very high-quality products and have much more advantaged cost structures and plant locations. The only way to fight back against this structural setback is to be more productive – i.e. – to get more production out for the same amount of manhours/cost. Unfortunately, this was not the case at Warwick. Most of Warwick’s production will move to Europe. Xerium will continue to fix its global cost issue in the machine clothing business. We still have a few more plants that have serious issues,” said Harold Bevis, Xerium’s President and CEO.
“As with all plant closures,” continued Mr. Bevis, “these are difficult decisions which have a significant impact on our people, their families, and the communities where they live and work. Unfortunately, this is a straight-forward business decision given the economic realities involved. These actions will help increase the company’s competitiveness and enable it to be a better supplier to its customers."
Xerium Technologies, Inc. is a leading global provider of industrial consumable products and services.
