Norgren's products help tugboats in the Port of Wellington, New Zealand save 30 percent in fuel consumption. The company's cylinders, air-processing products, and valves powered a machine that toughened up the members of a British rugby team. Soccer fields in the Netherlands use their pneumatic system to keep artificial turf resilient and safe. Their pneumatics have even made silicone amphibian creatures in a made-for-TV movie look "not just real, but alive and angry," according to the Australian animator who used them.

IMI Norgren Ltd (the US subsidiary of British giant IMI plc) is a leading international supplier of onboard pneumatic and electronic products, with more than 30 years' experience in the commercial vehicle industry. The company offers a wide range of products, and holds expertise in areas including trucks, trailers, buses, military vehicles, and other markets. The company sells to first-tier OEM suppliers and aftermarket distributors and has its primary manufacturing and design centers in the US, Germany, Britain, and Brazil. Norgren's services and products are available in 75 countries, and the company has 7,000 employees worldwide. Sales last year totaled $200 million for the Americas and $650 to $700 million worldwide.

CEO Mark Shellenbarger says Norgen's greatest strength is brand equity and name recognition. "October 1, 2001 marks our 75th anniversary in the United States," he says. "We've been around a long time." Clients have looked to Norgren for "FRL" (filters, regulators, and lubricators) since Carl Norgren founded the firm and invented the first in-line compressed air lubricator, Shellenbarger says.

The company has lost US market share in recent years, Shellenbarger admits, from a high of 80 percent in the 1960s. "Today we face literally dozens of competitors, while there were only two or three in the 1960s," he says. In the US, Norgren ranks fifth, with 6.7 percent of market share, after Parker Hannifin (with 17.3 percent), SMC (11.2 percent), Numatics Inc, and Mac Valve, says George Turnage, research analyst for the power transmission group of Frost & Sullivan, an international consulting firm. "Norgren is a very large player in the European market," Turnage adds.

FRL accounts for half of Norgren's business, direct control valves for 15 percent, pneumatic activators for 25 percent, and push-in fittings for 10 percent. Currency fluctuations can hurt overseas sales, such as in Brazil, where the local currency has been devalued 20 to 30 percent in the last six months. The firm focuses on offering customer-specific solutions, Shell-enbarger says, such as air tools used in automobile manufacturing. About 15 percent of Norgren's business comes from sales of tools made directly to stores such as Sears (the Craftsman line) and Home Depot. The company's products are also sold in catalogs such as Grainger.

Times are tough right now, Shellenbarger admits—with business down 15 to 20 percent this year. "We sell a lot to Volvo and General Motors and tier-one suppliers like Bendix and Webco for the heavy-duty truck market," he says. "In 1999, there were 320,000 heavy trucks built in North America, in 2000, 240,000 and 140,000 in 2001. There's a glut of used trucks out there. It is a major concern. It's a lot of business for us, and a business we rely on." Shellenbarger hopes to ride out the downturn by focusing on the specifications of new trucks currently on the drawing board. "That's the real opportunity," he says.

Key to ongoing success, Shellenbarger says, is diversifying Norgren's client base, expanding into such growth fields as medical equipment, semiconductor equipment, and packaging machinery. A promising niche is the growing interface between pneumatics and electronics, he adds. "They're now much more sophisticated and right out on the equipment, so we have to become a lot more sophisticated in our electronics," he says.

"Trucking affects Norgren dramatically," agrees Turnage, "but there are lot of other end-user groups out there as well: aerospace, mining, petrochemicals. When they have tough times in one area, they may be able to recoup in another. They have a good feel for the market and where they are and what it is they are trying to achieve. Norgren is a strong company with the finances to support them. They're not going away anytime soon."