Walther Trowal Expands North American Operations

To manage increasing business volume in the Americas and to better serve American customers in the field of surface finishing and preparation, Walther Trowal LLC (Grand Rapids, MI) expanded sales branch with additional manpower and a process development lab, their North American Tech and Training Centre.

Initially established as a sales office, this U.S. subsidiary of Walther Trowal GmbH & Co. KG (Haan, Germany) has become an operation with their own test center, after-sales service activities and a sizable warehouse for compounds, media and spare parts. Effective immediately, two recently hired application and sales engineers that are stationed in Grand Rapids now support nine distributors in the U.S. and Mexico, including a sales office in Querétaro, Mexico. The newly established process development lab, equipped with a range of different finishing machines, now offers American customers the possibility to test equipment with their workpieces directly in the United States in order to optimize their finishing processes.

“We consider close proximity to our customers as essential to our future success,” noted Ken Raby, the vice president and general manager of Walther Trowal LLC. “With our expanding sales and technical base in Grand Rapids, we can adapt our processes and systems much better and, especially, much faster to the requirements of the American users. In the field of mass finishing it is particularly essential to develop and optimize the various finishing processes for our customers through processing trials under manufacturing conditions in our test lab.”

This new Tech & Training Centre is equipped with a lab for coating technology that allows customers to test various coating methods and develop the right process for their coating requirements with Trowal Coating technology. “The North American market is somewhat different from Europe, especially in the United States where the automobile industry is still a key player, but is subject to enormous cost pressures,” explained Christoph Cruse, the general sales manager of Walther Trowal GmbH, regarding how they are expanding their presence in North America. “That is why it is essential for us to offer our customers fast and competent service. Long reaction or down times are no longer acceptable. We also see a tremendous potential in the rapidly expanding aerospace industry and medical engineering.”

The capacity of the large new warehouse ensures that Walther Trowal LLC can offer short delivery times for equipment and consumables. In Latin America, Walther Trowal has also expanded their presence with the recently opened sales office in Queretaro, where local staff is supported by the experience and service of their colleagues in Grand Rapids. The mass finishing, shot blasting and coating equipment, and plastic finishing media are still supplied from company headquarters in Germany, while ceramic media continue to be manufactured at their plant in Stoke-on-Trent, Great Britain.

www.walther-trowal.com