Mold manufacturing archetype – a breakthrough in the Vietnamese automotive industry

The archetype is considered to be the “cornerstone of industry”, most of the manufacturing industries such as electronics – semiconductors, aviation, transportation, packaging, household appliances, etc. Because of that reason Truong Hai Automobile Joint Stock Company (Thaco) has conducted research, design and manufacture of molds for some truck parts. Over 3 years, THACO has mastered the design and technology of manufacturing 3 types of typical molds used in the automotive industry: combination dials, claw dies and injection molds.

Most of the automobile manufacturers and assemblers in Vietnam have quite low output, especially trucks, while in order to develop the mold manufacturing industry, the output of the products must be large enough. As one of the leading enterprises of Vietnam’s automobile industry, with the goal after 2019, THACO will exceed 120,000 vehicles / year, of which over 50% are trucks, so the problem developing the mold manufacturing industry to increase the localization rate of tax trucks is feasible. To solve this problem, Thaco proposed and was approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology to implement the state-level science and technology project “Research, design, manufacture molds for some truck parts”. After 3 years of implementation, Thaco has completed its goals and mastered many advanced technologies.

Thaco chose to design 3 types of molds for typical automotive components: the combined mold used to make truck exhaust shackles, the stamping mold used to make the details of the seat cushions and driver seat frames. Injection molding is used to make steering wheel parts for truck cabs. These are 3 types of parts with complex structures and using different materials, designed for the NX Unigraphics Siemens software, processing technology using 3/5 axis CNC milling machines. Especially, the design and manufacture of molds of these 3 parts will allow the deployment of other details and components of Thaco’s trucks and buses.

Based on mastering the design and technology of making molds for many parts, truck components, typically the light truck KIA Frontier, Thaco have applied the research results to mass produce molds for all kinds of limbs details of all other truck lines. Technology has contributed to increasing the localization rate of the car, the RVC content value of the 3 products, contributing to the increase of the localization rate of the whole car to 0.990%; increase production technology content for all 3 types of combined dies, claws and injection molds to 56,41 and 53% respectively.

Mold manufacturing technology contributes to Thaco reducing product costs by 25 to 29% compared to imported molds of similar quality, reducing the production costs of components from these 3 molds from 12 to 18 %, not only help the Company create new jobs, gradually regain domestic market share, but furthermore will contribute to the formation of supportive clusters (cluster) for the automotive industry in particular, the industry mechanical engineering industry of the country in general, effectively serving the goal of improving the competitiveness of Vietnamese cars in the intra-ASEAN market.

Productivity and Quality Office