Fernando Rodríguez hands over the management of Elcoro and Norica to his daughters María Jesús and María Asun, who will strengthen the company’s commitment to its own products.
Elcoro Decoletaje and Norica celebrate this year the 130th and 105th anniversary of their creation, respectively. Two centenary industrial projects that face this anniversary having completed the generational handover at the head of both businesses and with the design of strategic plans in which they will focus on the environment and sustainability, the strengthening and automation of their manufacturing systems and the promotion in the market of their new generations of own products: the ‘Topac’ pneumatic hammers (Elcoro) and the historic ‘Norica’ compressed airguns.
Conquering the United States.
Norica, after 105 years of activity, has positioned itself in more than 60 countries, but curiously, it had never added the United States to its list. The company’s managing director, María Asun Rodríguez, who has taken over from her father Fernando, is very hopeful of putting an end to this commercial anachronism, which “will contribute to meeting the objectives we have set ourselves in the 2022-2024 plan”. At the last trade fair in Las Vegas “we presented a world revolution in conventional break-action airguns, a recoilless system that we have patented in the United States, China, Turkey and Europe. The reception was very good and has led to major contracts in South Africa, Australia and Arabia, as well as opening doors in Canada and the USA, where we are in advanced negotiations to sign an agreement with a major national distributor”.
By 2024, they hope to manufacture 35,000 airguns annually.
This leap in the United States will contribute to the objectives of increasing production of airguns, whose mechanical parts are manufactured by Elcoro, to “reduce costs and selling prices”. The plan’s goal is to reach an annual production of 35,000 units, with an aggregate growth of 40 percent since the pre-covid years: “We have to take into account that, as a leisure element, the airgun sector did not suffer from the health crisis,” stresses María Asun. In order to take on this industrial leap more effectively, Norica is preparing a series of actions that have begun with a contract with Tekniker to reorganise the Elgeta plant and move from a manual assembly system to one of semi-automatic lines (one for conventional airguns and another for PCP -with compressor-). After completing this work, they are currently preparing the lay out of the facilities, which will increase efficiency and quality and which will include the 35-metre shooting range where the airguns are tested. As María Asun Rodríguez explains, the boost to their market offer includes a series of innovation projects with which they will focus on expanding the catalogue with more economical models and on the efficiency of the production processes. In this way, they are working on creating more affordable alternatives in PCP airguns, which they will present in Las Vegas in 2023. On the one hand, they will offer these models with a fibre stock instead of wood, and the option of mounting a domestically produced barrel, the machining of which will be undertaken by Elcoro. Another vector of improvement will be the standardisation of components for different families of airguns, which will provide industrial and economic synergies.
Full article: Empresa XXI