Argosy International Founder and Executive Chair Paul Marks chaired Conference Session 3: Mobility & Lightweighting Solutions at JEC Forum Southeast Asia 2026, held in Taipei on 23–24 June. Introducing a panel that included Airbus CTC, AIDC, Cobra International, Cetim and Loiretech, Marks set up a session spanning composite wing structures, AI in manufacturing operations, UAV airframes, and the move of thermoplastics into mass production.
Sven Karras, Head of Cluster Assembly Technologies at Airbus CTC, and Jim Yu, Deputy Director of Engineering at AIDC, presented lessons from a composite wing structure development project — a long-running collaboration between a European OEM and a Taiwanese tier supplier. The theme running through it was cooperation: composite innovation inside the Airbus ecosystem depends increasingly on Asian manufacturing partners qualified to program standard.
That dynamic is the operating environment Argosy has worked in for 38 years. Supplying qualified honeycomb core, carbon fiber, prepregs and process materials to primes, tier suppliers and MROs across APAC and worldwide is what makes those collaborations viable at the shop-floor level.
AIDC President Jennifer Chuang presented AIxWare, the company’s initiative applying artificial intelligence to composite manufacturing operations. The commercial argument is straightforward: composite production is constrained by material out-time, freezer inventory, cure cycle scheduling and labor allocation, and those are optimization problems.
Argosy’s partnership with Plataine addresses the same constraint set. The TPO platform applies AI-based scheduling and material traceability to composite production environments, tracking prepreg out-time and freezer stock in real time rather than through manual logs. Sessions like this one confirm that the sector has moved past evaluating whether AI belongs in composites manufacturing and on to which processes it should govern first.
Danu Chotikapanich, CEO of Cobra International, covered practical composite use in commercial drones — one of the fastest-moving demand signals in Asian advanced manufacturing. UAV airframes place unusual demands on material supply: high strength-to-weight requirements against production volumes that sit between prototype and serial manufacturing, with compressed development cycles.
Argosy supplies thermoset and thermoplastic prepregs with glass, aramid and carbon fibers/fabrics, various core materials – PMI foams, aluminum and aramid honeycombs, and composite consumable materials in support of these types of programs. The supply challenge is less about specification than about availability at the right volumes and lead times, which is where regional stock positions matter.
Benoit Dugast of Cetim’s Composite TP Team and Franck Bourcier of Loiretech Canada closed the session on the transition of thermoplastic composites from R&D into mass production. This has been the sector’s stated ambition for the better part of a decade, and the panel’s framing was notably practical — the barriers now are process maturity, tooling and qualification pathways rather than material performance.
For material supply chains, that transition changes the picture. Thermoplastic systems carry different storage, handling and processing requirements to thermoset prepregs, and distributors serving aerospace and mobility customers will need to support both in parallel for years.
JEC Forum Southeast Asia 2026 brought together 358 participants from 22 countries for more than 800 pre-arranged business meetings.
Session 1 of the forum addressed carbon fiber market volatility directly, with Formosa Plastics presenting on the challenges facing carbon fiber supply in an unstable petrochemical environment — a relevant discussion for Argosy, which distributes TAIRYFIL® carbon fiber in Europe and the Americas. Between that session and the mobility panel, the two-day program mapped both the demand-side opportunity and the supply-side pressure shaping material availability into 2027.
Argosy participates in forums of this nature to support the composite industry’s ecosystem with thought leadership and to learn about how industrial leaders are thinking about today and tomorrow.
Talk to the Argosy team about material supply for aerospace, commercial UAVs, eVTOLs, and mobility programs across Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world.
