Read the whole story here

Words KEITH CURTAIN
Photos FIONA HAMPSON
FOB
THAILAND
FREIGHT ON BOARD, THAILAND.
It used to be that surfboards
marked with Thailand on its
country of origin documentation
were frowned upon. Since it was
founded in 2002, Global Surf
Industries (GSI) has been squarely
in the firing line of Asian
xenophobia, accused of
threatening the future existence of
the time-honored tradition of the
custom made surfboard industry,
of running sweat shops, exploiting
a juvenile workforce whilst
engaging in dubious health and
safety standards in order to pump
out cheap, mass-produced popouts. In August this year ASB
tagged along to visit GSI’s joint
venture partner Cobra
International with four Australian
surf retailers to learn that amongst
other things, not all factories are
created equal.
It felt like we were UN weapons inspectors.
We were, after all, the first group of retailers
and only the second surf magazine to ever
be allowed behind Cobra’s closed doors.
“Like Charlie in the Chocolate Factory,” as
Murf from Murf’s Longboards in Ocean
Grove succinctly summed it up. It was clear
that some of the Cobra executives were not
enthused by ASB’s presence. “Would the
people from the magazine please raise your
hand,” asked Chief Commercial Officer &
GSI director, Andre-M Plump. I felt the
warmth of a red laser dot on
my forehead and the trail of eyes quickly set
down on ASB. “No pressure,” I joked. In the
past several European based magazines
had exposed certain composite
technologies and windsurfer designs. When
millions of dollars in contracts are on the line,
you can appreciate Cobra’s right to hang
onto its IP. On another occasion, an
unnamed European publication used that
platform to write derogatory comments
about the quietly spoken company president
Vorpant Chotikapanich. On this particular
trip the only weapons of mass destruction
we found were some finely crafted Webber
guns that did the job a few
weeks later in solid 6-8 foot G-land barrels.
“I have often wondered
what these factories are
like and I have a vision
of a flat wasteland,
grey skies, chimneys
reaching into the murk
and big square sheds.
A bit like the Pink Floyd
album cover on
‘Animals’. The reality
was nothing like it.”
Victor Tilley, Red Herring, Tasmania.
Our journey begins
“We’ve lost a factory!” exclaims the affable
Kym Thompson, our guide through the
industrial maze that is Cobra International.
It’s hard to imagine the scale of this
operation unless, as the old saying goes,
“You’ve actually been there”. Located in
the Muang industrial district of Chonburi,
Thailand, Cobra sits adjacent to corporate
heavyweights such as Sony, Mitsubishi and
Toyota, in a satellite industrial “city” about an
hour from Bangkok’s CBD. The area was
developed, as a trade free zone many years
earlier by the Thai government in their push
to become the “Detroit of Asia” and it’s hard
to argue it aint.
Inside the foyer are CAD renderings of
Cobra circa 2000, 2001 and 2002. The last
few years are missing. Presumably, those
responsible for the company’s décor,
haven’t kept up with Cobra’s exponential
growth. I’m sure the mild mannered Vorpant
Chotikapanich, a native of Thailand, former
24 /
champion windsurfer and Cobra’s current
president, never imagined that the original
company he founded in 1985 would grow
to become one the world’s leading fibre
composite manufacturers, producing nearly
200,000 epoxy surfboards and around
70,000 polyester boards per year. These
divisions, combined with Cobra’s other
interests generate an annual turnover in
excess of US$65 million. Cobra’s chief
financial officer, the man charged with
looking after all that cash, is British born
Mark Chewter, who greets our group on
arrival and offers some sound financial
advice. “Be careful with your money,”
he says.
//australasian surf business magazine /
“For me personally, who
pretty much grew up in
a factory watching my
dad for 20 years, I was
really looking for some
high tech factory that
created high quality
products with minimum
waste and a work ethic
that compares to
nothing over here...
that’s pretty much what
I got.”
Darren Longbottom, Zinc, Kiama.
// issue fourteen / feature article //
The best way to appreciate the scale of
the operation according to COO and avid
windsurfer, German born Andre-M Plump,
is to dial Cobra into Google Earth. Like the
Great Wall of China, Cobra is visible from
space. Every year a new factory seems to
be added. In our case, the missing factory
housed high-end IMS classified yachts that
weigh about 500kgs and take up to 18,000
man-hours to produce. The place has
grown exponentially with the demand for
surfboards, windsurfers, yachts, jet skis,
and any kind of fibre composite product
you can imagine, including 48-metre wind
turbine blades and an entire milieu of
products that we didn’t have time to see
or were too numerous or obscure to
reference here.
Awards, accolades and
sad indictments
Through the expansion of its product
offering, Cobra has stamped itself as a
leader in fibre composite technology, having
achieved numerous awards, including ISO
9002 certification by Bereau Veritas Quality
International (BVQI) in 2002, the highest level
of international certification attainable for
production and manufacturing processes.
The company is striving forward to attain
ISO 14001 certification for environment
management systems – a goal it hopes
to achieve by 2007. Everywhere you look,
around the walls of the factory, are little
company mantras that read, “Yes, we can”
and “Building dreams, one board at a time”.
There’s no nude calendars on the wall at
Cobra, no lazy buckets of acetone sloshing
around the place, no cloth and tape strewn
from one end of the bay to the other, no
foam dust in the daily garbage. Cobra
accumulates several tonnes of garbage a
day, but there’s barely a visible trace of it.
Much of it is traded between factories, i.e.
off cuts of fiberglass from the surfboard
section are sold to the fins section. OK, so
maybe we’re guilty of the same stereotypes
once accused of Asian manufactured
surfboards. But we all know a shaper like
this back home.
“Our aim is to ensure that boards made
in this factory, boards marked Made in
Thailand, can be displayed like a badge
of honor,” explains Thompson. Indeed, it’s
this desire to be accepted as part of the
surfing world that’s possibly the catalyst for
Cobra’s pursuit of excellence. It’s also the
reason, it’s fair to say, that all factories aren’t
created equal.
Thompson left his beloved Bells Beach
over nine years ago to help kick start
Cobra’s surfing division. And what a
division. It now matches the windsurfing
division in terms of revenues; contributing
45% of Cobra’s total US$65 million. In fact,
the tributes to Thompson came fast and
furious from friends back home, including
one in particular from former mentor and
shaping legend, Murray Bourton. “Tell Kym
I said ‘hi’, tell him I’m sorry we didn’t have
enough work for him back home at the
time... and tell him he’s gone on to become
our worst nightmare!”
exceed or at least are commensurate with
Thai laws. But despite this, Thompson
admits retaining key staff is still an issue.
“Often times we’ll train them up and they’ll
get poached by rival industries.” Clearly,
that’s an issue for all business’, not just those
isolated within Asia. Poaching staff is still the
exception rather than the norm at Cobra.
It’s clear to me that as the five o’clock shift
workers make their way to a procession of
buses at the front gates that the smiles on
their faces indicate anything but oppressive
sweat shop conditions. The sweat, if any,
was probably generated from volleyball or
footsall, a type of aerial ping-pong played
by foot with a rattan ball, that these guys
play with extreme skill on their breaks. The
sweat could also have been bought about
by the concentration and toil they exert on
every miniscule task they’re involved with.
“What the Thais lack in surf culture, they
make up with a manufacturing culture,”
explains Thompson.
Enter GSI
To complement its range of production
technologies, which include pultrusion,
prepreg lay-up, wet lay-up, filament winding,
vacuum moulding and sandwich structure
production, Cobra has set up five joint
venture companies with key suppliers to
aid its manufacturing business. DSM,
based in Chonburi, Thailand, manufactures
soft goods from Grip to board bags to
promotional accessories, while APM
Marketing GmbH in Munich, Germany, is
Cobra’s European liaison office offering
customer service and sales. Another JV is
Composite Marine (CMI) a 50/50 partnership
with pro UK boat builders John Higham and
Pom Green. But it’s Global Surf Industries
(GSI) that Australian surf retailers would
identify with, and who were our gracious
hosts on this tour of duty.
“It’s a really professional
unit with everyone
working together, from
the person laying up to
the person filling his (or
her) bucket with resin,
they all do their own
little bit and its hands on
all the way.”
Murf, Murf’s Longboards, Ocean Grove.
Tim Hanrahan. Aloha, Manly.
In September 2002, Cobra entered a joint
venture partnership with Manly based GSI
to act as its exclusive marketing and
distribution arm worldwide. The JV spawned
a variety of products for 11 different brands
distributed to 19 countries, the latest being
the United Arab Emirates. GSI’s success lies
in the strategies adopted by president Mark
Kelly – an ability to identify a variety of margin
building products whilst controlling its
channels of distribution. In an interview for
ASB Issue 11 feature article ‘Charlie Don’t
Surf’ Kelly claimed that by targeting the entry
level and intermediate market GSI hoped to
attract more people to the surfing lifestyle
and bring more dollars into the surf industry.
“Last year GSI Australia spent most of our
advertising budget of $200,000 outside the
surf industry, working to bring consumers
into the surf retail channel,” Kelly said.
Today, the company has 15 factories
expanding out over 13 acres, although Kym
swears the missing yachts are housed in
Factory 17, an area of Cobra he clearly never
visits and doesn’t even exist yet. It’s simply
staggering to see the rows and rows of
surfboard moulds that line the massive
factory aisles, each one costing several
thousand US dollars to manufacture.
“Imagine if they opened a seconds outlet,”
joked Victor Tilley from Red Herring. Cobra
employs around 4,500 permanent staff and
each worker is entitled to their own hospital
and medical benefits that extends to their
immediate family. They receive wages, which
Another division, Cobra engineering,
specialises in industrial tooling and
machinery, providing complete machine
shop services, including four computer
numerically controlled (CNC) machines that
run 24 hours a day, six days a week. It’s this
seamless manufacturing integration that
allows Cobra to offer turnkey solutions
without using external suppliers. Adjacent
to the CNC machines are 20 shaping bays
where Thai “shapers”, each trained under
Thompson’s expert tutelage, finish rails and
fine sand each board. Some of these guys
have been finishing boards for over 10 years
and I wonder how many custom boards
back home could make the same claim. It’s
also at the helm of the CNC’s master control
“It’s really big. It’s really
organised and it’s way
more environmentally
friendly than I expected”
// section name / issue fourteen //
//australasian surf business magazine /
room where we meet another Aussie expat,
Matthew Miles, Cobra’s front line manager.
Matt left Perth seven years ago to help assist
with blank formulas and set up of the CNC
unit. And like most of Cobra’s key staff we
met on this trip, he never returned home.
In fact, at every layer of the Cobra juggernaut
there seems to be an Aussie, or an Aussie
component. The stringers on the PU boards
are produced from sustainable, regenerated
forest timber in Australia and imported to
Thailand. At dinner one night a quiet, mild
mannered guy pipes up and introduces
himself as Bruce Wylie. Bruce is Cobra’s
windsurfing division’s version of Kym
Thompson. It turns out he won the first
Olympic windsurfing gold medal for Australia
at the LA Olympics in 1984 and, after the
great MR, was one of the few Novocastrians
to be awarded the keys to the city.
Bruce joined Cobra from Hawaii where
he was a successful windsurf designer
for various leading brands and now calls
Thailand home.
“The biggest thing that
stuck in my mind is
something Kym
Thompson said to me...
These guys (Thais)
aren’t the best at
creating things, but
they are the world’s
best bar none at
mimicking things. I
thought about it for a
while and it is deadset
on the money and a
sign for the future.”
Darren Longbottom, Zink, Kiama.
The production process
The production process for GSI’s NSP and
South Point ranges are based on a vacuum
press moulding process. The mould and
tooling is made from a master design. The
foam core is then made and shaped (Cobra
produces EPS foam core by EPS injection
moulding, while polyvinyl chloride (PVC)
foam cores are also used). The core is
sanded into shape and drilled for fin boxes to
be fitted. Vacuum press moulding of the core
with the fabric/resin laminate then follows.
The assembly line process concludes with
trimming and/or re-shaping, painting (primer
and topcoat), finishing, final inspection and
packing. It’s also perfectly clear how the
price/margin structure works for each
particular model. The NSP and the South
Point ranges involve 24 and 28 “hands on”
production and QC stages. The additional
workmanship in the South Point models is
reflected in the higher price. So there it was,
in black and white; the more work involved,
the more bucks you pay. The NSP boards
alone include numerous man-hours each to
produce – clearly far from being pop-outs,
as some would allege.
But GSI and Cobra are not confined to
restricting new technologies or new brands
to its epoxy program, with their “traditional”
polyurethane (PU) offering expanding at a
rapid rate and sitting around 70,000 units
per year. Joining Cobra’s PU program is
none other than Al Merrick, with his newly
created Anacapa range of boards, which
were released last month. We saw the first
shipment of the Anacapa range being toiled
away on by Thai worker’s. Few Aussie
shapers could claim to have met the man,
the legend, Al Merrick himself, but the Cobra
sand and finish team have when ‘Big Al’
recently came to Thailand to oversee the first
production run of the brand. Similarly,
Greg Webber spent several days with the
production staff overseeing the original
Afterburners and the more recent 6’6 and
7’0 semi guns, imparting his knowledge
about rails and finishing touches. There’s
also another side of this business, it’s
Cobra’s custom made boards, constructed
with a hand lay-up and vacuum bag
technique. Depending upon the board
model, the materials used can include
combinations of high performance epoxy
resin, vinyl or polyester resin, PVC foam
sheet, polyurethane foam, fiberglass, carbon
and aramid fibre fabrics, and various paints
and topcoats.
While the base of Cobra’s manufacturing
technology is vacuum moulding, the
company has developed other processes
as it has needed them, including pultrusion,
prepreg lay-up, wet layup, filament winding,
press moulding, thermoforming, foam
injection, resin transfer moulding (RTM) and
sandwich structure production. But it has
also adapted these processes to its own
requirements. “There is no R&D section – it’s
the entire factory,” Cobra’s Chief Technical
Officer, Pierre-Olivier Schnerb, explains.
Thompson provides us with practical
examples. “Take the fin set up. These Thais
developed a little gadget that takes all the
guesswork out of laying up and setting the
fins. I looked at it and thought, ‘shit, why
didn’t I think of that 20 years earlier!’”
It’s the people that count
Cobra’s success is a result of the mix
of people it employs. There’s a clear
organizational hierarchy at Cobra, but it
evaporates when the topic of surfing,
skating or windsurfing is involved, much like
anywhere else in the world really. The 15 key
unit managers are a variety of nationalities
and most are avid surfers or windsurfers.
They get real excited when the wind blows
up a 2ft wind slop in southern Phuket and
they can tell you about a trip ‘down-south’
like the best of ‘em. CCO, Andre-M Plump,
recounts another story about Satja
Cheyankanon, a surfer of Thai/American
descent and a popular standout vin his local
line-ups in Delaware, USA. Satje threw his
American passport in the bin during his
interview for a position with the management
production unit at Cobra, proudly exclaiming,
“I’m Thai now”. During my visit I was
overwhelmed by the genuine passion for the
products and the company.
“It’s great to see how
harmonious the whole
factory worked as a
team from upper
management right thru
to the lowest ranks. But
the highlights for me
would have been the
camaraderie shown by
the Thais at lunchtime
playing sport, the
lunch halls, their daily
Buddhist prayers and
the massive amount of
respect they have for
the King (of Thailand).”
Tim Hanarahan, Aloha, Manly.
The pioneering spirit was alive and well in
this often-waveless haven in the backblocks
of an industrial district in Thailand. It seems
that Satje, Matt, Kym, Bruce and Andre all
left behind fair shores, good waves, family
and friends to forge a new beginning at
Cobra and ended up staying a little bit longer
than expected. I don’t know if it’s catching
but I just can’t get the high pitched voice
singing, “oh won’t you stay, just a little bit
longer, pleeeease stay just a little bit more”
out of my head. Maybe it was the karaoke
that continued late into the night at the end
of our tour.
------------------------------------------------//
/ 25
// The first shipment of Al Merrick/GSI’s ‘Anacapa’ boards get the eye.
// The Cobra sand and finish unit.
// The feeding of the 5000. Thai Curry anyone?
// Thai style prepeg lay-up. Just another cog in the wheel.
26 /
// Cobra achieved ISO 9002 certification by Bereau Veritas
Quality International (BVQI) in 2002.
// Lunch hour games played with a rattan ball and great skill.
// Approximately one third of Cobra’s production staff is female.
//australasian surf business magazine /
// It ain’t all black and white and some factories
arn’t created equal.
// Its hands on all the way.
// Team Cobra including Kym, Matt, Lane, Satje,
Prasapan, Andre and Bruce.
// issue fourteen / feature article //