IN 2002, MAPAL Italia is constructing a modern new building in Gessate, near Milan.
Maximum customer support through on-site presence
1990–2025
From the 1990s onwards, many MAPAL customers set up production facilities abroad. It is not possible to provide them with the optimum support they are accustomed to in Germany via the purely commercial agencies that now exist in many countries. MAPAL therefore follows its customers with its own sales and production companies, initially in Western Europe and later also in Eastern Europe.
MAPAL BECOMES EUROPEAN
MAPAL establishes its first non-German subsidiary in Europe in Italy in 1990 because it is no longer satisfied with the performance of the local commercial agency. Initially there was only an office near Bergamo, production capacities were created in 1994 with the takeover of a competitor. In 2002, the two MAPAL Italia sites were merged in a new building at Gessate near Milan. MAPAL France is a blueprint for some foreign companies: When the French commercial agency gets into financial difficulties, MAPAL sets up its own agency in 1992, which is managed by the employee previously responsible for MAPAL in the commercial company. Shortly afterwards, MAPAL bought a company specialising in reamers near Lyon and set up a production facility there, primarily for PCD tools, fixed tools, solid carbide and multi-bladed reamers. Two decades later, sites followed in Nantes and Toulouse to supply Airbus, and a sales office was also set up in Paris.
In Great Britain, too, a commercial agency forms the nucleus for a MAPAL agency of its own. Following bankruptcy proceedings, several employees moved to the new MAPAL UK in Rugby near Birmingham in 1993 and built it up into a flourishing company in a very short time.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, numerous car manufacturers and their suppliers relocate parts of their production to Eastern Europe - and MAPAL follows suit. Without being able to build on previous trading partners, the company first has to gain a foothold in the previously “blank spots” on the Eastern European map. In Hungary, this is achieved in 1995 with MAPAL Tool Management Services (TMS), which, in addition to tool management, also carries out tool reconditioning directly at the customer's premises. Also in Hungary, Hungarian Tool Consulting & Management Ltd. is established in partnership with several companies. HTCM looks after an Opel cylinder head plant and in 1998 wins a VW engine plant in Poland as a customer. After an intensive search, MAPAL found a suitable sales partner there in 1996, which became part of the MAPAL Group as a subsidiary in 2002. In the same year, a Czech MAPAL subsidiary is established in Prague, whose tasks also include looking after customers in Slovakia. The European “eastward expansion” of MAPAL is completed in 2004 with the founding of a Romanian sales company in Bucharest.
In addition to the subsidiaries, MAPAL now has sales representatives in eleven other European countries, ensuring optimum customer proximity and high quality support.
