MAG IAS GmbH, the builder of various manufacturing machines and processes, completed the sell-off of its Industrial Equipment business to the Taiwan-based Fair Friend Group, which is a holding company for numerous machine tool brands already. The value of the sale has not been revealed.
The sale agreement, which was first announced in September and includes MAG’s Hessapp, Hüller Hille, Modul and Witzig & Frank brands, is seen to accelerate FFG’s expansion in the EU market.
FFG has over 60 companies in all, and its machine tool division (about half it’s total revenue) has 23 different brands and 32 production plants in Taiwan, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. Other business units produce industrial IT products, industrial machinery, and green energy equipment.
While most of its turning, cutting, and grinding machines are distributed under the Feeler brand, FFG Group is a joint-venture partner with several builders, including Takamatsu, Citizen Miyano, Waida, Toyota Tsusu, Marubeni, F.T. Japan, EMC Japan, Takeuchi, as well as Mectron, and Yamamoto Sumizawa.
In its initial announcement, MAG noted that FFG had been expanding its presence in Europe, in terms of production capacity and product and technology range: the FFG Europe organization includes the core FFG companies as well as Italian machine tool manufacturers Jobs, Sigma, Sachman, and Rambaudi.
“The group's strategy is targeted at expanding its activities to form a strong global machine tool group with fully functional regional structures,” MAG IAS stated then. “The Industrial Equipment portfolio matches with the group's strategy, rounding out the advanced technology portfolio of FFG Europe, while targeting corresponding industries. The manufacturing capacities in Germany, the value of the brands Hessapp, Hüller Hille, Modul, and Witzig & Frank will expedite FFG group's growth substantially.”
MAG IAS was formed in 2005, with multiple CNC machine product lines and nameplates, an organized as two divisions, Industrial Equipment and Automotive. This divestiture follows the sale last March of the group's MAG Americas holdings (Giddings & Lewis, Cincinnati, and Forest-Liné) to the Fives Group, a French holding company.
Now, the MAG strategy is to concentrate its activity in the global automotive manufacturing market (car and truck OEMs and their tier suppliers), and it noted that its 2013 sales targets in that market had been reached.
In that way, MAG continues to supply CNC machine tools for machining engine blocks, cylinder heads, and crankshafts, and it indicated plans to focus on technologies for other powertrain components and automotive suppliers in the future. It continues to maintain several machine tool brands — Boehringer, Ex-Cell-O, Cross Hüller, Lamb — and it has manufacturing sites in Germany, China, Hungary, India, and the U.S. (Sterling Heights and Port Huron, Mich.)
