Today we announce that Swedish Group Lesjöfors and Alcomex together will form a European leader in the springs industry. This marks an important next phase for our company. We are excited about the opportunities for our Alcomex team, the benefits for our customer and our future together with Lesjöfors.
With this transaction, Lesjöfors becomes our majority shareholder, taking over that role from Nordian. Conrad Hietink and Jelle van Vliet will remain shareholders and managing directors of Alcomex. That will not change. Alcomex will be a separate division within Lesjöfors. We will continue to execute our growth path and will at the same time benefit from the collaboration within the Lesjöfors Group – with now an even broader and deeper product base for our customers all over Europe.
It has been our Alcomex team that has consistently delivered on our customer service and customer response strategy: in quality, in lead times, on-time delivery, cost consciousness, flexibility and technical solutions engineering. And by doing so, we truly built a European platform for growth.
For Lesjöfors, this is a landmark transaction. They are very impressed with Alcomex’ performance over the last few years and they are excited about what we can achieve together. Lesjöfors and Alcomex have similar corporate cultures, comparable operations and a complementary geographical footprint. This provides a strong foundation for new opportunities in our markets.
As said: we remain as minority owners and managing directors to continue to develop the business. So we can continue and accelerate our strategy This was clear from the beginning of our discussions. We have invested in quality and in our teams. And we continue to do so. Our people live and breathe our customers’ needs and preferences.
Alcomex will continue to operate under its own brands and management. This is in line with Lesjöfors’ decentralized organization. They always work like this. Lesjöfors and Alcomex will retain separate factories, sales teams and operations in all countries. The springs market is large and demanding enough to have separate brands, factories and sales organisations.
So how will this change our work? On the one hand – business as usual. We continue to work as we have been doing over the last years. We keep our operations lean, flexible and focused on our customers.
On the other hand, we are expanding our opportunities. We will now have a combined standard stock springs catalogue for Alcomex of 10.000 standard stock springs. We will be able to achieve purchasing synergies, bringing costs down. We see strong new opportunities for springs in our product portfolio.
Jelle van Vliet and Conrad Hietink
