ICYMI – Conway Daily Sun: Sen. Hassan tours Albany plastics manufacturer Ambix

ALBANY – In case you missed it, U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) recently visited Ambix Manufacturing Inc. in Albany. Ambix is a high-end plastic injection design, molding, and manufacturing business. Senator Hassan toured the facility to learn about the company, which highlights the innovative work happening in the Granite State.

During the visit, Ambix leaders discussed the $153,000 in federal funding that the company received last year – in part through the Inflation Reduction Act that Senator Hassan helped pass into law – to build a solar array that was recently installed, which will help lower the company’s energy costs. Senator Hassan also highlighted how the CHIPS and Science Act, which Senator Hassan helped develop and pass into law, is strengthening supply chains and helping bring more manufacturing back to the United States.

Read more from the Conway Daily Sun here or below:

Conway Daily Sun: Sen. Hassan tours Albany plastics manufacturer Ambix

By Terry Leavitt

ALBANY — The Mount Washington Valley may not be known as a manufacturing hub, but that doesn’t mean those businesses aren’t here.

When U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan visited Ambix Manufacturing Inc., a plastics fabricator located just south of Conway, last Friday, she talked with Ambix principals, President Melissa Florio and Engineer Jeffrey Nicoll, about how businesses like Ambix are a hidden sector of the local economy.

[...]Hassan toured the plant with Florio and Nicoll to learn about the company and to discuss a new solar array that was recently installed on the roof of the Ambix plant at 1369 Route 16 in in Albany.

Ambix received $153,000 in federal funding last year to build the array, and Florio and Nicoll said that investment in federal dollars helped keep the company on solid footing after energy prices went up more than 50 percent in recent years.

[..]Ambix’s solar project was one of 15 rural energy projects around the Granite State funded through the USDA Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, for a total of $1,966,511 in the fall of 2023.

The REAP was reauthorized by the 2018 Farm Bill and further funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, which Hassan supported and helped pass.

[...]Nicoll and Florio said companies like working with Ambix because it doesn’t hide its design and manufacturing processes.

Hassan said that is one of the advantages of small businesses in New Hampshire.

“We're all pretty collaborative,” she said. “I would say we punch way above our weight because we actually work together really well.”

[...]Manufacturers like Ambix do face challenges as a manufacturing company in a rural area, Nicoll and Florio said. Challenges include finding reliable transportation for their finished products, hiring a stable workforce and dealing with the costs of energy.

But Hassan said the growth of such small companies is a trend in returning to the U.S. manufacturing jobs that were moved to other countries in recent decades, and she works on federal legislation to support that trend.

Giving the example of the CHIPS and Science Act approved by Congress in 2022 to fund domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors, Hassan said federal funding to assist such companies is increasing in part as a result of the pandemic, which shined a spotlight on weaknesses in the country’s supply chains, as well as a recognition that it was a national security issue.

“We (the United States) were the ones who really invented the modern semiconductor. Increasingly, it was being produced overseas and we were losing the capacity to make things that are so essential now to everything from cars to washer and dryer machines, to computers, to weapons,” she said.

She added that bringing that kind of manufacturing back home also has great economic value.

“Once a workforce gets this kind of skill set, it's applicable across the board to a lot of other high tech manufacturing and making things and being able to produce real products is a really core part of every strong economy,” Hassan said.

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