Pelco Tool & Mold Inc. is expanding its thrust in thin-wall packaging molds and in-mold labelling through a cooperation agreement with a Dutch company.
Pelco of Glendale Heights, Ill., will market Brink Group products in North America and will serve as Brink's North American service center for existing Brink molds and IML automation products.
“We realized we need to expand our base into these areas,” explained Pelco co-owner Rob Suva in a phone interview. Pelco has specialized in caps and closures molds so the partners already supply a similar customer base in the packaging market, he added.
Brink is based in Harskamp, the Netherlands, and operates three production and engineering operations in that country. It also has joint ventures in South Africa, the Middle East and Russia and an array of customers in 72 countries. It makes fast-cycle injection molds exclusively for packaging in food, paint, chemical and horticultural markets. It designs and build molds for buckets, pots, cups and lids as well as automated IML systems. It has annual sales of about 35 million euros ($39.4 million).
Pelco, a private company with about 35 employees, designs and builds simple open-and-close molds, and complex stack molds with side actions and unscrewing cores. Suva said Pelco regularly makes two-level, 72-cavity molds and some four-level stack molds and that it has the expertise to make the kinds of products Brink specializes in.
Pelco has spent about $1 million in the past few years on expanding machining capacity in its 21,000-square-foot facility. Pelco's annual sales are about $12 million.
Brink already has customers in North America, and Pelco already quotes on offshore tool-building jobs but the companies will more easily compete in their foreign markets through the cooperation agreement.
“Highly flexible and fully automated production today demand complete integration [turnkey solutions] of molds and in-mold labelling automation into the production environment of thin-wall packaging producers,” noted Brink CEO Kees Van Heerikhuize in a news release.
“For Pelco, this is a unique opportunity to work together with a world class supplier of both molds and IML robots,” Suva elaborated. “It also provides opportunity for Pelco to get exposure in the European cap and closure market.”
Pelco business development manager Jim Griswold and Brink international sales manager Max Zinnemers will be responsible for the firms' North American commercial activities.
Both companies were established in 1963. Pelco founder Emil Peluso sold the business in 1991 to Suva and his partners, Dick Truhlar and Roger Wittersheim. All three owners have extensive mold building backgrounds.
