Fair and square

A quick word on the Fair Friends Group. Visitors to EMO 2017 would have found it difficult to miss its immense stand, but then there’s nothing small about this company. Headquartered in Taiwan and headed up by Jimmy Chu, the business comprises three main divisions: machine tools; industry equipment; and green energy.

Its Machine Tool Division operates 50 manufacturing bases worldwide across 10 countries, spanning an impressive 37 brands. In 1989, FFG sold its first machine tool for $30,000; in 2015 its revenues hit $2 billion. Growth on steroids.

Whilst MT Squared is a new company, its roots lie in a business that will be familiar to many PES readers – the MAG Group. MT Squared’s shareholder Mo Meidar has a long association with MAG and the business has evolved from a series of his acquisitions over a period of time.

In fact, at the end of 2005, he acquired the Cincinnati Group, closely followed by the machine tool businesses of ThyssenKrupp (which included Giddings & Lewis and Fadal) and IWKA (Boehringer, Ex-Cell-O). The sum of parts resulted in the formation of the MAG Group.

MAG’s UK manufacturing demise is well-documented. By the end of 2008 the company closed its UK manufacturing facilities of Cincinnati Machine, Cross Hueller, Ex-Cell-O and Lamb. Sales of their respective products had been falling and maintaining manufacturing in the UK was no longer viable. Manufacturing of the UK products was moved to MAG facilities in Germany and the USA.

John Boyd has held various positions within the MAG Group since joining in 2006. At the height of the acquisition period in those early years of MAG, he was living in Germany and was heavily involved with restructuring of the European side of the business, including consolidation of the European sales channels and the forming of MAG Maintenance GmbH, a new limited company providing parts and service along with other customer services for all of the MAG manufacturing plants worldwide.

Business restructuring

With consolidation and restructuring complete and profitability returning to the German plants, Mr Boyd was then asked to relocate to the UK at the end of 2008. MAG UK had been formed, consolidating all of the UK employees from the aforementioned businesses under one roof at Fort Dunlop in Birmingham. The UK organisation was however far from profitable despite having over 3,000 MAG Group machines still in operation in the UK.

“My brief was simple: ’make the business profitable,’’ Mr Boyd advises. “Unfortunately, that meant pretty drastic restructuring and a headcount reduction whilst continuing to provide first class service to our customers.

“Our offices at Fort Dunlop, where we occupied the whole of the fourth floor became much too large for our needs. In addition, maintaining an offsite warehouse for parts storage was not efficient. We therefore made the decision to move to new premises at Maybrook Business Park in Minworth with offices and warehouse. By this time the decision was also taken to focus entirely on a sales and service organisation for the MAG Group of companies.

New beginnings

2013 saw big changes. The ‘American’ side of the business – Cincinnati and Giddings & Lewis – was sold to French company, Fives, and the Fair Friend Group acquired MAG’s Industrial Equipment Group which comprised its aerospace, automotive and general engineering divisions. 50% of MAG Maintenance GmbH was also sold to FFG.

For undisclosed reasons, MAG UK wasn’t part of the deal and remained under Mo Meidar’s ownership – but it had to be renamed. In 2016, MT Squared was born and today it trades as an independent company. Mr Meidar has a 100% shareholding in the business.

“When MT Squared was set-up initially, FFG’s European management understood what we were doing here and liked what they saw,” Mr Boyd reveals. “They weren’t in a position to buy the company at the time, but they wanted to work closely with us so we established a formal agency agreement.”

MT Squared currently employs 24 people at its 800m² facility in Minworth – including two salesmen – headed up by general manager, sales, Jon MacDonald – and nine service engineers. Real estate is split, with 400m² devoted to office space and the remainder to the storage of £750,000 worth of spare parts. With FFG’s vast range of products now part of MT Squared’s portfolio, space is at a premium.

And the aforementioned product range is indeed vast. The FFG products alone comprise: VDF Boehringer horizontal lathes, turning centres and specialised machines for crankshaft machining; Hessap vertical turning centres; MAG (of course); Modul hobbing and gear cutting machines; Jobs high-speed 3/5-axis VMCs; Rambaudi moving column/overhead gantry/fixed bridge machining centres; Sachman travelling table/travelling column 4/5-axis machines; Sigma VMCs; IMAS rotary table transfer machines; Pfiffner machine tools; and Witzig & Frank machines.

On the grinding front, FFG has also acquired Meccanodora, Morara and Tachella. It still services and supports Giddings & Lewis and Cincinnati machines in the UK.

But independently from FFG, MT Squared also has distribution agreements in place with Waldrich Siegen (heavy-duty milling, turning, grinding and texturing machines), Union Chemnitz (horizontal boring mills) and the recently formed Zuse Hueller Hille. Also, hot off the press, is the news that it has just signed an official agency agreement with 3D printing specialist Gefertec GmbH.

“It’s important to note that for any new FFG products that we bring into the UK, we’ll have two engineers factory trained to look after not only the installation, but also ongoing support,” Mr Boyd adds. “Our focus is on the high technology end of the market rather than simply a provider of commodity products, so our speciality is applications engineering and providing solutions to our customers. We get excellent support from the OEMs that we represent.

“We have over 300 UK customers who regularly do business with us. They include blue-chip companies, tier suppliers to the aerospace and automotive OEMs, large manufacturers, small privately owned companies and subcontract machine shops. These will continue to be our focus in addition to building up a new customer base.

“Aerospace is a particular growth area for us,” he says, “as are a number of E-mobility projects concerning hybrid and battery powered cars.”

Keep it cool

Diversely, MT Squared also has an exclusive distribution agreement with US-based 5ME – a company specialising in cryogenic machining and manufacturing software called Freedom eWARE. The former is interesting technology which uses a patented system to deliver liquid nitrogen (at -321° F) directly to the cutting edge enabling substantially faster processing speeds and increased tool life compared to conventional cooling methods.

“This stems back to our MAG Group days,” Mr Boyd explains. “We were selling a number of machines into the aerospace industry specifically for titanium machining and our customers were looking to us to optimise their processes. Titanium is always challenging: you can build bigger, heavier, more rigid machine tools but if you can’t get the spindle speed and tool life up, you’re constantly battling against the material.

“So, through discussions with the aerospace primes, MAG developed the cryogenic technology. Mo Meidar retained this intellectual property when the company split and set-up 5ME in Detroit in the US.

A cryogenic machining retrofit kit is available through MT Squared but Mr Boyd is keen to emphasise that a lot of development work is required for a specific application and there isn’t a one size fits all solution. A good example is Lockheed Martin’s adoption of cryogenics from 5ME to machine a particular component for the JSF programme in the US. The companies worked closely together to formulate a solution.

“Every application is different,” Mr Boyd emphasises. “The process involves a tank holding the liquid nitrogen, which is pumped to a regulator which controls the flow. The liquid is then passed through a series of stainless steel pipes to the spindle and then the tool. It then passes under the tool tip and exhausts up through the front. The actual application of the process will obviously vary from machine to machine which is why the development work can be so intensive. It’s all about taking heat away so that cutting data can be optimised and tool life extended.”

5ME’s eWARE software, according to Mr Boyd, was effectively an Industry 4.0 forerunner: “MAG was really ahead of the curve developing this,” he states. “This is all about building intelligence into the machine tool to monitor vibration, feeds, speeds, performance, spindle and bearing wear. Initially it was developed, through data collection and analysis, to formulate more efficient maintenance programs but it can also be used to monitor and eliminate production bottlenecks.”

It’s all about growth over the next five years for MT Squared and Mr Boyd has devised a plan that he believes is definitely achievable: “I looked at all our brands and carried individual analyses for each,” he concludes. “Although we have some well-known, established brands, essentially, we’re a start-up, so whilst my forecasts are on the conservative side – they’re definitely realistic. We’re exhibiting at MACH 2018 so that’ll be a good opportunity to promote the business to a captive audience.”

MT SQUARED https://www.mtsq.co.uk/