Rainbow Trust Wins Customers With Quality

The Rainbow Trust Industrial Co., founded in 1984, specializes in making hose assemblies for the automotive, motorcycle, and home-appliance industries. The company is a fully integrated manufacturer which, with TS 16949 and ISO 14001 certification, offers an almost unmatched variety of hose types, fitting designs, and tube shapes to meet the different requirements of customers worldwide.

Already the world's largest producer of stainless-steel braided Teleflex 1/8-inch Teflon hose utilizing Dupont's T62 polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) resin, Rainbow Trust controls almost all of Taiwan's market for motorcycle brake hoses and is now fully prepared to go global.

Most of the company's products fall into four categories: brake hose assemblies for hydraulic disk-brake systems on motorcycles, scooters, all terrain vehicles (ATVs), utility vehicles (UTVs or side-by-sides), and other vehicles; air conditioning hose assemblies for cars and home appliances such as refrigerators and other air conditioning systems; power-steering hoses and oil-cooler hose assemblies; and various kinds of high-precision hose fittings.

The firm currently operates two plants in northern Taiwan with a total of about 120 employees. It was the first authorized overseas producer of Teleflex's 1/8-inch Teflon brake hoses, for which it does all of the stainless-steel braiding. The company's goal is to develop an alternative brake hose that has performance characteristics similar to those of Teflon but is much more cost-competitive with rubber hoses.

Proud of Customer Regard

"I'm proud of the fact that all of our customers regard us so highly for offering strong R&D capability, best-quality products, and, more importantly, a dedication to the constant pursuit of the first and the best," says company chairman S.H. Shih. "In quality and speed of developing new products, we are the best and the fastest."

Thanks to its quest for the best, Rainbow Trust is a frequent winner of supplier awards from major customers such as Matsushita Taiwan, Kwang Yang Motor Co. (KYMCO), Sanyang Industry Co. (SYM), Yamaha Taiwan, and Denso Taiwan Corp.

A slogan that Shih stresses frequently is, "without quality, you have nothing." This is the essential foundation on which Rainbow Trust grew steadily from its early years as a small company with strong technical capability into one of the best-known auto- and motorcycle-parts manufacturers in Taiwan.

The chairman keeps an eye on the past even as he focuses on making improvements for the future, setting up and refining internal management systems, cultivating talented professionals, upgrading and renewing R&D equipment, collecting the latest industry information, introducing new technologies and materials, and constantly upgrading production processes to cut costs so as to keep his company at the head of the pack.

Paying Off

Eyeing the prospects for the development of Taiwan's motorcycle industry, Shih promoted a partnership between Rainbow Trust and NICHIRIN of Japan to introduce advanced technology for the production of high-pressure, low-inflation rubber brake hoses to the island, making Rainbow Trust a key driver in the upgrading of the quality and technical level of Taiwan-made motorcycles and scooters. With the improved quality of their disc brake systems, Taiwan's high-quality, safety-engineered motorized two-wheelers faced a smoother road for export to the world's industrially advanced markets.

In 2000, Rainbow Trust signed an agreement with Teleflex Fluid Systems of the U.K., a subsidiary of Teleflex Inc and an international manufacturer of PTFE hoses and accessories, to become the exclusive agent in Asia for Teleflex's Teflon brake hoses. Teleflex uses pure PTFE powder to make the best braided hose products in the world.

These products opened the way for Rainbow Trust's rapid growth during the years that followed, paving the way for sustainable operation and long-term business advancement.

Rainbow Trust's sales of Teleflex's 1/8-inch Teflon brake tubes soared from 12,000 meters in 2001 to 600,000 meters in 2006, to account for 95% of the product's total sales.

This performance greatly impressed Teleflex, and in 2004 the U,K. company signed a technical-transfer agreement with Rainbow Trust for the production of stainless-steel braided sleeves for all of Teleflex's 1/8-inch Teflon hose. Rainbow Trust immediately poured about US$10 million into a brand-new plant with manufacturing equipment imported from Italy.

In 2006 Rainbow Trust received production authorization and quality certification from Teleflex for Teflon brake hoses, and began production in the middle of that year. Rainbow Trust currently operates a comprehensive Teflon hose production line with bobbin winders, 12 braiding machines, three high-pressure leakage test machines, and an ultrasonic cleaning machine, among other equipment.

New Plant in Vietnam

With an eye on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) regional market, in which about 80% to 85% of the world's motorcycles are sold, Rainbow Trust inaugurated a new brake-hose factory in Vietnam in 2008.

According to Shih, more and more motorcycles sold in the ASEAN market are being equipped with disc brakes. The ratio of disk brakes is now about 50%, and the figure will increase at a high speed in the next few years as consumers made affluent by the Asian economic boom demand higher-quality transportation vehicles.