
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, July 9, 1994                   TAG: 9407110198
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY  
SOURCE: STEPHEN FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RADFORD                                LENGTH: Medium

RADVA PLANS EXPANSION, JOBS

Radva Corp. will hire at least 25 additional employees by October and expand into another building, the company's president said Friday.

Luther Dickens said an explosion of orders for the company's Thermastructure building panels has prompted the company to add to its current number of employees - about 130 in Radford - and its manufacturing space.

"We're doing in a month what we were doing in a year before," Dickens said. Specifically, in the first five months of 1994 the company's production of the panels exceeded all of its production in 1994.

The major portion of Radva's business continues to be its shape-molded projects, making Styrofoam-like packaging for computers or liners for bicycle helmets, for example. Although the company introduced the patented Thermastructure building panels - made of steel-reinforced expanded polystyrene similar to Styrofoam - back in 1976 , "it's just now beginning to come into its own," Dickens said.

(rest of this story ran on Cw in the New River Valley edition).

Radva owns about 30 percent of a company in Russia that makes the panels, which substitute for traditional wood frame construction, and sales there are up, Dickens said. An Australian licensee that sells them told him Thursday that he has more orders than he can fill.

It's conceivable that the increased orders could level off, but Dickens says he doesn't think so.

Last month, the Radford Industrial Authority approved the issuing of $740,000 of revenue bonds to enable the company to purchase a 35,000 square-foot building, which Radva had already been partially leasing, said IDA Chairman George Williams.

"We thought they were deserving, so we decided to help them," Williams said.

Now Radva, which also runs a plant in Portsmouth, will move its Thermastructure operations into the new building on Rock Road, and add an additional 5,000 square feet of manufacturing space to it, Dickens said.

"We're pretty bullish about what's going on," Dickens said. "If it continues to increase the way it has, we'll end up needing more space and more people before we get this ready."

by CNB