The global site of the UK's leading magazine for automation, motion engineering and power transmission
28 March, 2024

LinkedIn
Twitter
Twitter link

Taiwanese partnership brings automation range to the UK

29 March, 2013

Great Yarmouth based Softstart UK has formed a strategic partnership with the Taiwanese industrial automation manufacturer Delta Electronics to sell and support its AC drives, PLCs and HMIs in the UK. Although Delta is not well-known in the UK, its products have been available before carrying the names of some major automation suppliers.

Delta, whose turnover in 2011 was more than $7bn, claims to be the world’s largest supplier of switching power supplies and DC fans, and the third-largest supplier in of AC drives and servomotor products to the Chinese market. Its wide-ranging portfolio includes dedicated lift motors and drives, power quality products, encoders, CNC controllers, machine vision systems and temperature controllers.

Softstart UK’s managing director Stuart Harvey (above) describes Delta as “a hidden treasure”, adding that it is “probably the world’s biggest manufacturer of VSDs by volume”. He says new partnership is “very exciting”.

Softstart UK and its sister company Silverteam were formed in 2003 as a joint venture between Harvey and Hitachi Europe to sell Hitachi drives and PLCs in the UK following the receivership of Hitachi’s previous UK distributor, HID. The venture worked well and, by 2010, Silverteam was selling around £1.4m worth of Hitachi drives a year. Then Hitachi revealed that it had reached an agreement to sell its drives under the Omron name in Europe, and was terminating its contract with Harvey.

Although he could still sell Hitachi products, Harvey’s turnover plummeted by two thirds and he had to lay off nine of his 12 members of staff.

Harvey looked around for an alternative drives supplier and initially reached an agreement with the Korean manufacturer, Hyundai Heavy Industries, to sell its automation products in the UK. According to Harvey, this worked well “for a while” but he found it “a pain” doing business with the Korean company which had no presence in Europe, demanded cash payments upfront and could take six months to deliver products.




Magazine
  • To view a digital copy of the latest issue of Drives & Controls, click here.

    To visit the digital library of past issues, click here

    To subscribe to the magazine, click here

     

Poll

"Do you think that robots create or destroy jobs?"

Newsletter
Newsletter

Events

Most Read Articles