Toray Industries has acquired a 350,000-square-meter plot of land in Sri City, Andhra Pradesh, India, to establish a local subsidiary—Toray Industries (India) Private Limited (TID), president Akihiro Nikkaku has announced. The site will house a state-of-the-art polypropylene spunbond nonwovens line to meet growing demand for the materials in the Indian disposable diaper market as well as nylon and PTB resin compounding facilities.The new line, which represents a $40 million investment for Toray, is expected to be operational in 2020.

The new spunbond line will have an annual capacity of 18,000 tons and will target the growing disposable diaper market, which is benefitting from improved lifestyles changes, a high birth rate and a huge population—about 1.34 billion people live in India, the second largest country in the world by population. Major hygiene manufacturers have been aggressively expanding their businesses in India to meet current and future demand.

Toray's compounding facilities will help it meet demand in the automobile market, which is expected to grow at a rate of 7% per year until 2025. In addition, it is believed that the requirement for Toray’s high performance materials will increase given the expanding demand for high performance auto parts and sophistication of customer demands along with the tightening of environmental restrictions in recent years.

One of the largest nonwovens producers in Asia, Toray operates lines in China, Korea and Indonesia. The new line in India, as well as similar investments underway in China and Korea, will bring the company's total capacity to 209,000 tons by 2020.