Furniture Brands International is building a case goods plant and distribution center here that will be its largest such facility in the world.

The 1.4-million-square-foot operation on the island of Java is about five miles from an existing Furniture Brands plant in Semarang. That 330,000-square-foot facility was built as a Maitland-Smith plant and today primarily produces for FBI’s Maitland-Smith and Henredon brands.

Furniture Brands eventually will shift all manufacturing now done in the Semarang facility to the new plant. In additional to Henredon and Maitland-Smith, the new plant is expected to produce higher-end product for FBI lines including Drexel Heritage and Thomasville.

Officials didn’t reveal the plant’s production capacity or how much of the company’s Asian capacity it will represent. FBI said it will continue to source from plants in Vietnam and China as well as from South America.

Furniture Brands also has several U.S. manufacturing and distribution facilities with total square footage of well over 3 million square feet.

One reason for the expansion in Tambak Aji is that the Semarang facility lies in an area prone to heavy flooding, the company said. FBI also wants to do more production internally rather than source from contract manufacturers.

(Source)

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