As the industry responds to customer demand for style variants and niche models, with shorter development times, Pilkington Automotive helps customers engineer value into vehicle glazing - cutting costs in parallel with product enhancement.

High quality glass production starts with the float process, developed by Pilkington and now the industry standard. Automotive glass production includes pre-processing, toughening, laminating, encapsulation, extrusion and assembly, adding functionality.

Let the mixture digest for a time - and you are well on the way to making one of the world's most important materials. This is the basic recipe for float glass, one of the greatest of all industrial process inventions, comparable with Bessemer's innovations in steel manufacturing.

Vehicle build shows long-term industry growth to be around 2.1 per cent a year on average. But for glazing this is only part of the story - other demand drivers play an important part, both in terms of volume, and importantly, value.

Take a glimpse into the NSG Group's technology..... adding value through innovation. NSG Group technology is all around you, yet often unnoticed because of the perfection of transparency it brings to today's glass products.

The NSG Group is one of the world's leading manufacturers of glass and glazing systems in three major business areas: Architectural Glass Products, Automotive and Technical Glass. Founded in 1918, NSG Group acquired the leading UK-based glass manufacturer Pilkington plc in June 2006.

Pilkington Automotive operates as a single global organisation serving the Original Equipment (OE) and Automotive Glass Replacement (AGR) Aftermarket sectors. Principal operations are in Europe, Japan, North America, South America, China and Malaysia, combined into an integrated worldwide business unit, across all regions and distribution channels.

Watch the magic of this science-based process begins to unfold, in a series of stages on a float line that may be nearly half a kilometre long. Raw materials enter at one end. From the other, plates of glass emerge, cut precisely to specification, at rates as high as 6,000 tonnes a week. In between lie six high integrated stages...

Mirai, meaning 'future' in Japanese, was developed to mark the start of the next generation of low-carbon glass products to help meet stricter sustainability requirements in the built environment.

The increased requirements being placed by the VMs on the glass suppliers favours the 'Global Three' OE glazing alliances in terms of the industry's need for: technical capabilities - shaping, optics, design feasibility/simulation