We would like to give specific thanks each and every one of you for your support during 2016. We hope you all have a wonderful Holiday Season and a Prosperous 2017.
Let’s take a quick look back at some of Huntingdon Fusion Techniques HFT ®'s Weld Purging highlights.
Early in the year, we participated in the TechniShow, Holland assisting on our Distributor, Pipeq Pipework Equipment’s Booth. There was good attendance at the Exhibition with lots of interest for our products.
We held a Weld Purging Distributor Training Course in February at our UK HQ and were pleased to be able to take Maciej Machowski from Rywal, Poland along with us to the Welsh Business Awards as we were a finalist in the ‘Exporting Excellence’ category.
In April we attended the TUBE Exhibition in Dusseldorf and were pleased to meet up with some of our European Distributors. We were also finalists in the Association of Welding Distributors (AWD) Welding World Awards 2016 and were pleased to pick up the “Best New Welding Product” award presented to us by Michael Portillo. This event was running alongside the MACH Exhibition at the NEC Birmingham, which hosts a ‘welding village’. This year’s event was bigger than ever with a large number of visitors attending.
In May our Distributor, Buenos Aires Welding, Brazil attended the Femagh Exhibition displaying PurgElite ®, QuickPurge ®, PurgEye 100 ® and our miniature version of the Flexible Welding Enclosure ®.
In June we travelled to Moscow to attend the TUBE Exhibition and meet with our Distributors. We spent time training their sales personnel in Weld Purging Techniques and since our visit, the enquiry and order level coming from that area has increased quite nicely. We also held a Distributor Training Course with delegates attending from several UK Distributors including Electro-Cal in Cumbria.
July and August tend to be quiet months in the Weld Purging World, with the European holidays but we did hold a Distributor Training Course over this time with delegates from West Country Welding Supplies, Bristol, Weld-Tec, Glasgow and BMC Marine, Turkey. We were very pleased to welcome to our network of Exclusive Distributors and wish Gursel good luck in building his new business. We are looking forward to assisting him with some Weld Purging Presentations in 2017.
In October we spent a week with our Polish Distributor, Rywal. They are always a pleasure to visit and we had some super customer visits with terrific enquiries for special Flexible Welding Enclosures ® and Weld Purging Equipment.
November was a very busy month for us. CEO, Georgia Gascoyne presented a technical paper on corrosion resistance at the Stainless Steel World Conference, Houston, USA. The conference coincided with the American Elections so it was an interesting time to be there particularly when the final result was announced.
Following this, we participated at FabTech, the Annual Joining and Welding Exhibition being held this time in Las Vegas. Our USA Distributor, COB Industries had a nicely positioned Booth and we displayed our new, state of the art, Weld Purge Monitors ® in the 10 ppm range. The main feature of the new monitors is the PurgeNet™ Networking System to allow HFT ® Weld Purge Monitors ® to control automatic welding systems, on off lights, dew point meters and so much more.
Bearing in mind the current world economy we felt the show was a great success for us. Footfall was certainly up on previous years when we have exhibited and we came away with a good number of quality enquiries.
At the beginning of the month, Huntingdon Fusion Techniques HFT ®'s exhibited in the Welsh Government section of the Energy Industries Council (EIC) Pavilion at the ADIPEC Exhibition in Abu Dhabi. Our Technical Sales Manager, Luke Keane was assisted on the Booth by several representatives from PCT Group, our Middle East Exclusive Distributor. They were able to learn all about the new Weld Purge Monitors ® in the 10ppm range and have since placed orders for new models. Thank you PCT and congratulations to Luke who was voted ‘Best Welsh Exhibitor’ during the Show.
For another consecutive year, we were the main sponsors for Burry Port RFC, who are doing extremely well again this season. The Blacks are now in the last 16 of The Welsh Rugby Union Bowl completion which they won last year at the Cardiff Stadium and we wish them all the best on their journey.
Instagram has been a fantastic achievement for us this year, with over 20,300 photos likes from the past 12 months alone. We now have a strong 1,800 followers and a great support network of welders posting some fantastic photos.
Huntingdon Fusion Techniques HFT ® also brought you our Product Feature, a weekly dose of product information to keep you at the forefront of our Weld Purging Innovations! We hope you enjoyed these updates and plan to continue our Product Feature updates in 2017.
As the months have passed, we have watched our results, in what has been a declining economy but we have kept close to our results for 2015. It has been a tough year for everybody in our network of Distributors but we are receiving positive signals for 2017 and have already seen a marked increase in our December order intake.
What’s in store for 2017? As previously mentioned, we will be releasing literature and information for our New Range of Weld Purge Monitors ® shortly, we have some updates to the Trailing Shields ® and we are hoping to see the return of the TEG-2 Tungsten Electrode Grinder – watch this space.
Best wishes from the team here at Huntingdon Fusion Techniques HFT ®!
