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PEOPLE NEWS
Microporous appoints new CEO as Jean-Luc Koch steps down
Microporous announced John Reeves had been hired as CEO on December 8 in a sudden move in which Jean Luc Koch, who has headed up the firm since it became independent in 2013, resigned with immediate effect, reportedly for personal reasons.
“The company said: “John brings years of experience to the company in a range of industries, including engineered materials, chemicals and construction products.
“Additionally, John has more than a dozen years of executive leadership experience at private equityowned businesses, driving growth in revenue and enterprise value.”
Reeves’s background is material science, with a bachelor’s degree in textile and industrial engineering. Much of his career has been with material science, working for Lincoln Industries in coated fabrics, and the German life science firm Hoechst Celanese on a variety of polyesters.
Out of a joint venture with Hoechst and the BBA Group in 1997, Reeves grew AQF Technologies, a filtration media start-up, into a dominant gas-phase filtration technology industry. By 2000 the business was expanding at a 35% annual growth rate with Reeves at the helm as CEO and president.
BBA retained Reeves in various VP posts to lead the strategy for the development of the firm as vice president of engineered materials.
It was when he joined building materials firm IPS as president of Structural Adhesives in 2008 that he was first introduced to private equity.
“This was in high-end adhesives and in 10 years the company grew by about 850%,” he told Batteries International. “Some 60% was organic, 40% was acquisitions. So I’m a technology material science kind of guy that’s fortunately figured out how to do that well for private equity-sponsored businesses.
“When this opportunity with Microporous came along — with a lot of the raw materials and processes similar to what I’m used to — it seemed a good fit.”
Reeves admits that there’s a lot of learning to do with regard to the lead-acid battery business, but “the notion of developing innovative products and driving a business by pleasing customers and offering them materials that can help move their business forward is similar to what I’ve done in the past,” he says.
“I’ve only been here a few weeks and it’s interesting how our customers are willing to work with us on different projects. It’s a very collaborative industry, which I’ve found delightful. There’s a determination in the industry to combat challenges and a desire to offer higher quality, longer life products.”
As far as the future for Microporous goes, Reeves says it’s too early to say. “We have the ability to grow in lots of different ways,” he says. “Our sponsors have been very dedicated to Microporous and spent a tremendous amount of capital investing in the business.”
Claudia Lorenzini, vice president sales and marketing, thanked outgoing Jean Luc Koch and said he had built Microporous into what it is today.
“Our company has thrived since its re-emergence as an independent company seven years ago and has been investing heavily in equipment, processes and people to assure that it is well positioned to continue to support our customers and our industry,” she said.
“We are excited about the future and are extremely confident that John will have the same level of enthusiasm to help Microporous’ customers to achieve continued success and grow our business together.”
John Reeves
Bryan Allen
Microporous has also appointed Bryan Allen as director of sales for North America, in early November.
Allen previously worked as a senior director of sales for Leoch Battery. Before that he spent nine years with Exide Technologies, initially as a business development manager and then as a manager for strategic/national accounts.
His brief at Microporous is to contribute to the growth of the North American business and increase the company’s market share by opening up new accounts and promoting the sales of existing and new products.
Allen says: “The introduction of different materials, for instance reducing the resistance and increase the charge acceptance opens up a world of opportunities for separators,” he said.
“PSoC applications are driving a lot of the battery technology now — with forklifts, for example, you want to be able to charge it up periodically throughout the day so it stays running and isn’t down sitting on a charger for four hours.
“You can apply that mentality to the UPS market, where batteries are covering almost micro outages, little blips in electricity, so the battery has to be designed to take a small hit and then go back online and be charged periodically throughout the day. It’s the same with the renewable energy market.
Allen will report to Claudia Lorenzini, vice president of sales and marketing.
“Our company has ... been investing heavily in equipment, processes and people to assure it is well positioned to continue to support our customers and
our industry” — Claudia Lorenzini
Randy Hanschu
July 24,1952 – January 3, 2021
It is with sadness that Batteries International has to announce that Randy Hanschu — known to almost two generations of US and international batterymen — died on January 3 in Kansas City.
Hanschu, who worked in the battery industry for 40 years, is probably best remembered as The Man From Daramic.
For some 30 years he tirelessly crossed and recrossed North America as its sales rep. He also represented the separator firm in South America and Europe.
Hanschu was brought up on a farm outside Ramona, Kansas where he attended church from an early age. He later was to attribute his ethos of hard work and practical faith to his early years.
In 1976 he joined General Battery Corporation as a quality control technician. Two years later he married the love of his life Jo Malone.
In May 1987 General Battery Corporation was acquired by Exide Technologies and the following year he left Exide to join WR Grace — which later was to become Daramic — in a sales position, eventually becoming a senior technical sales manager. Although he formally retired, aged 66, in 2018 he continued to help the firm when and as needed, until recently.
Hal Hawk, owner of Crown Battery, said: “When you look at the job description for Supplier Rep, you need to go to Randy, he wrote it, he lived it. Customer First, always! Additionally, he was the only Supplier Rep that could sign in, and immediately go to the plant floor, unescorted — the only one!
“That speaks volumes about him and the trust he earned. It wasn’t given, he earned it.
“On the employee relation side, he was first class — he treated all of staff like they were management, and never saw him without a smile, never. At Daramic receptions, he was the face and gentlemen in front and behind all the planning, making sure everything and everyone was more than taken care of.
“He will be more than missed, never replaced, and most certainly never forgotten.”
One former colleague, Peggy Hicks, said: “I worked with Randy in Owensboro at WR Grace/Daramic for few years. He was such a kind soul. He always had a smile and was friendly to all of us in the office. His personality was joyous and he always had a story to tell.”
Another former Daramic colleague, Mark Sherwood, said: “Randy was a class act both professionally and personally. He was an inspiration to so many in his professional world with his positive attitude and willingness to help.”
Randy Hart, chief executive of Superior Battery, speaking as both a customer and a friend, said: “Randy was a person that you really enjoyed being around. He was our sales representative for many years and we had a good many visits together. He was a professional in his work but more than that you knew he was your friend.
“I always looked forward to his visits and I knew he valued our business, but even more our friendship.”
A family friend said: “Randy was always on the go — he had a hard time sitting and relaxing. He truly loved his family, friends, battery customers, gardening, small machine repairs, the Kansas City Chiefs, and John Deere tractors. He loved cooking, barbecuing, gardening, and tinkering in his shop. His granddaughter, Ryleigh, was the light of his eyes, they shared many work projects and dance performances.
A celebration of his life and was held on January 11.
He is survived by Jo, his wife of 42 years, his daughter Kacie and granddaughter, Ryleigh.
Exide veteran Jimmy Stewart moves to high profile slot at MAC Engineering
Doug Bornas (l), CEO of MAC Engineering and Jim Stewart
Jimmy Stewart, the Exide veteran who joined the battery firm fresh from high school in the mid-70s and rose to become a senior director for global equipment, facility and tooling engineering, has joined MAC Engineering as vice president of sales and marketing.
He started in January.
Stewart has an experience almost second to none in understanding how battery manufacturing works. This is quite literally from the early production steps such as grid casting through to formation — he was the first person in Exide to come up with the then novel and patented idea of linking control of the rectifier from mechanical timers and computerization — and then out of the door to consumers.
“We’ve been looking for someone like him for some time,” says Doug Bornas, president at MAC. “We recognized that as part of a new business model we needed to have in-depth plant production experience — that’s a very specialized knowledge — from an industry expert. And for that to be represented by someone our industry has a lot of respect for. And that’s what Jimmy has in abundance.
“As soon as I knew that he was leaving Exide after its latest restructuring I leapt at the opportunity of hiring him.”
Stewart has in fact known MAC Engineering for some 35 years, having a strong relationship with Mike Tole, past president and part owner. He says he can even remember when Bornas first joined the firm. (It was 1997.)
Stewart’s life in Exide started in August 1975 when his father, who worked at the Exide plant in Frankfort, Indiana, helped him get a job as an assembly line technical assistant. He had just left high school and admits that he had an insatiable interest in just “tinkering with things”.
He had also had some practical experience, which allowed him to fit in immediately.
“At the age of 15 I was working evenings and weekends as an apprentice in the maintenance department. Back in those days there were no work safety laws like we have today and I had my head and hands into 480 volt 3 phase electrical cabinets and maintained hydraulic presses. I look back today and say by the grace of God I didn’t electrocute myself!”
It was a period of great change in battery manufacturing and Stewart, already aware of the new programmable logic controllers developed as Allen-Bradley PLC (later known as Rockwell Automation), managed to introduce the first system on a line in Frankfort.
Initial management enthusiasm in the head office in Reading Pennsylvania was tempered with scepti-
Stewart’s rise from a technical assistant on an assembly line to a senior director at Exide has been a meteoric one. The next phase of his career at MAC Engineering could be as exciting as his first.
cism. “They just assumed that the manufacturing lines would need to break down with the previous air logic system,” says Stewart.
“So when it didn’t they thought that something was wrong! They had a real fear of electronics.”
Eventually, however, sense prevailed. Stewart was charged with introducing the system across all the Exide plants.
His life as a travelling engineer had started.
He reckons that from then on, or at least until Covid recently, he has spent around 75% of his time on the road or on a plane.
His career was to rise with changes across the firm, which quickly realised his value.
Early on, Exide had sent him to night school at Purdue University and this continued throughout his time.
In his late 20s Exide sponsored him to obtain his first degree, a bachelor of science in electrical engineering. This was followed a decade later by his masters.
As a key figure in orchestrating change at the individual plant level, his responsibilities increased with other changes in Exide.
Specifically, it was its decision to source much of the work that had been done inside the firm to external companies.
Although many of his duties were still being in charge of building and designing equipment it also meant that he was exposed to the latest manufacturing trends and — more importantly — evaluating them.
In the late 1980s he managed a team of engineers charged with, among other things, setting up a factory in Hays, Kansas that would make sealed lead acid batteries following the joint venture Exide had made with Yuasa.
“We started with a shell of a factory and left behind a fully working battery plant. Effectively we had to take the technology from Japan and adapt it to a US setting,” he recalls. “Because of government restrictions we had to build the equipment from scratch in the US.”
This was to directly lead on to what he reckons has been some of the most interesting work in his career.
Starting in the early 1990s, this consisted of setting up new battery factories from scratch. He was a key figure in designing and setting up two greenfield car battery plants in Russia worth around $180 million. Further work included another project from scratch in Uzbekistan, and work in Dubai, Canada, India and elsewhere.
“I look back with pride and the greatest satisfaction on this part of my life and work,” he says.
From 2000 his work was to support the integration of the GNB acquisition — sometimes dubbed an acquisition too far as it later drove the firm into Chapter 11 bankruptcy — into Exide’s business.
As a side note to history, Stewart was part of the initial team sent to value the GNB business.
“We said the price was way over-valued, at the time,” he says. “But the next CEO saw this as a way of getting back into our previous industrial division (which had earlier been acquired by EnerSys) and our voices were over-ruled.”
He is also a veteran of the multiple changes of chief executive at Exide.
“I’ve worked for more CEOs than I’ve got fingers on my hands,” he says. He survived the culls that Exide made in the first two episodes of Chapter 11 bankruptcy but the latest re-organization — sometimes called Chapter 33 [3 x 11] by those in the industry — left him high and dry as the firm’s Americas operation was split from its European and Asian business.
Stewart says he is now looking forward to the next chapter of his life.
“I’ve known MAC and its products for the past 35 years. I recognise their quality, expertise and how well they are made,” he says.
“Part of my job will be to be responsible for communicating with customers in the US and Canada in relation to sales, service and support.
“I’ll also support our global agents, Sorfin Yoshimura, and their customers throughout the rest of the world.”
But he also sees his lifetime of design expertise adding to MAC’s value proposition.
“MAC is a company that is continually seeking to advance its product range. I think we will have exciting times ahead as we move to lighter weight, higher quality batteries.”
Digatron’s Nick Hennen joins Inbatec as global vice president
Nick Hennen joined Inbatec, the German battery formation manufacturer known for its acid recirculation, in December as global vice president for sales and business development.
Hennen previously worked for Digatron Power Electronics for six years as a vice president of sales and latterly as vice president for the Americas and global business development.
At Inbatec he will be responsible for overseeing sales and marketing activities globally for Inbatec and sister company Kustan.
In particular he will look to expand the activities of both companies in the Americas.
He reports to Christian Papmahl, the managing director of Inbatec.
Also part of his remit will be strategic planning and business development for the organization to expand opportunities both within and outside the battery space. At the start of 2020, Inbatec and Kustan joined forces to combine their individual areas of expertise. Together the two have already designed a combined gel preparation and gel circulation process as a result of merging experience and bundling strengths.
Nick Hennen (l) with Inbatec head, Christian Papmahl
Project update: Lead battery industry sponsored Bali Children’s Project
The Bali charity that lead battery firms and conference delegates supported at the 2019 Asia Battery and Secondary Lead Conferences has been making huge progress in supporting children in the Indonesian island, it revealed in its recent newsletters.
The Bali Children’s Project, run by the charismatic New Yorker Linda Venter, said five school and library projects had begun, a Food Relief Appeal had been making more deliveries, its Banana School renovation project had been finished and a kindergarten begun construction.
After opening our 22nd and 23rd Karmagawafunded schools in Bali, we ended the year on a high. Meanwhile, we continued work on other libraries and kindergartens in Bali,” says Venter.
“We’ve also launched our next Community Donor Project, where we are asking supporters to contribute small amounts to help us reach our target. This time, it’s at Sembiran Library in the mountains of Balim.
“There was more good news as 16 students were sponsored for school thanks to December’s new sponsors.”
At ABC in Nusa Dua, the Children’s Project was one of three to receive a share
BCI Convention — it’s September and San Diego
BCI has confirmed that it has moved its regular late April Convention and Power Mart Expo, this year to have been held in Naples, Florida, to San Diego, California, and set a new date of September 22-25, 2021 for the meetings.
In a special announcement on December 2, BCI said it was encouraging attendees to register when it goes live early next year.
“Although we’ve adjusted to a new normal filled with virtual experiences in lieu of in-person events, social distancing and face masks, the desire to meet again inperson has been building,” the announcement says.
“BCI recognizes the important role face-to-face interaction plays in our industry.”
The North American lead battery industry will be eager to make up for the forced cancellation of this year’s April event, which had been organized for Las Vegas and had to go online for the first time.
In September the second major event of the year, the European Lead Battery Conference, had to follow suit, having originally been planned for Milan, the Italian city which initially bore the brunt of the virus.
All over the world, conferences have been cancelled or held online this year and next.
With the hope of at least three vaccinations being deployed as early as next week in the UK and other countries, event organizers and conference delegates will be hoping for a completely new scenario come 2021. of the $40,000 raised by delegates at the conference in a ‘One-Minute Giveback’ appeal, where backpacks were filled with essential school items.
The pandemic has halted tourism in its tracks — a major source of revenue to the island.
Battery Council International committee appoints Peng as vice chair
Shawn Peng, a senior director of research and development for C&D Technologies and Trojan Battery Company, was appointed vice chair for BCI’s Deep Cycle and EV Battery Committee at the end of October.
Peng, who worked for Leoch Battery Corporation for 14 years, latterly as chairman and vice president of technology, before moving to Trojan in 2018, is an active member of various international committees already.
He is a start-stop car battery committee key member for SAE International; a member of the IEEE PES Communications and Cybersecurity Committee; and a Working Group 2 and Working Group 3 member for the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission).
Bosch battery CEO Reinhardt Peper joins the advisory board for IQ International
Reinhardt Peper, former CEO of Bosch Battery Systems, has joined IQ International’s advisory board after retiring from Bosch in November, IQ announced on January 1.
Based in Detroit, US, Peper had headed up Bosch battery since 2013, having joined the company in 1984. Apart from a threeyear stint as CEO of Cobasys from 2009, Peper’s career had been spent entirely with Bosch until now.
Before retiring, he oversaw all company operations with regional responsibility for the Bosch energy storage business in North America, as well as being part of the Bosch electric power train and lithium battery development team.
Peper’s experience in international business, new technology and as part of the powertrain development team were cited by IQ CEO Kevin Loman as reasons for the appointment.
“This is an incredible addition of complementary skill to the diverse experience of the current advisory board members,” he said.
“The vast and varied intellectual property pipeline of IQ International presents compelling change for the traditional lead-acid battery industry,” said Peper.
“The vision and strategy to leverage the existing supply chain, commercialize recycling technologies and develop new technologies for application-specific and commercial economic constraints induced me to join the IQ advisory board.”
In October IQ appointed two former Johnson Controls Power Solutions (now Clarios) battery experts to its full-time workforce. Ray Brown, appointed chief integration officer, and Dennis Brown, chief marketing officer, already had seats on IQ’s advisory board.
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Reinhardt Peper
Tammy Stankey joins ILA board
Tammy Stankey, director of communications at The Doe Run Company and a well known and popular figure in the lead industry, was appointed to the board of The International Lead Association in November.
As a board member, Stankey will be part of a larger group of industry involvement and guidance in the work of the ILA. The ILA provides its members with technical, scientific and communications support, and opportunities for experts to meet on issues of importance to the lead industry.
The international work and initiatives of the ILA have grown enormously in the past few years as it has implemented a campaign to promote lead batteries as part of the energy storage solutions for a renewable future.
Stankey can only reinforce this. She is already well known for her work as a member of the communications committee for BCI and has a long-standing involvement with the Consortium for Battery Innovation. previously known as the ALABC.
“One of the great strengths of the ILA board is that we represent a diversity of views across the industry and we act as a sounding board for whole sections of the industry and also for ourselves,” she says. “We can offer an industry view and talking point about the issues that matter.”
One industry observer says: “One of the areas of ILA business that Stankey is likely to have most impact on is the ILA’s campaign on material stewardship — the duty of the lead industry to ensure that lead is used and recycled in a responsible way in terms of its impact on human health and the environment.
“This is a traditional remit of the ILA but one that has grown in importance in the past two years.”
Stankey says she is looking forward to being an intimate part of ILA thinking.
“As a lead producer and lead battery recycler with customers across the globe, it’s important for my firm Doe Run to be part of international discussions that shape the future of the lead industry,” she says.
But it’s also a personal buzz.
“What’s most interesting to me — since I joined the industry with Doe Run — is the people. From the outside we’re not a glamorous set of people within in an industry that’s not exactly highly regarded. But we have an intelligent, friendly and inclusive body of people, happy to work together for the common aims of the business. That’s rare.
“It’s fun and interesting to work in this industry — and especially to be part of the forces that will lead us on.”
ILA, which supports the safe production, use and recycling of lead worldwide, consists of some 40 member companies involved in the mining, smelting, refining and recycling of lead globally.
Tammy Stankey
Court throws out case against Aqua Metals’ Clarke, Mould and Murphy
The case against Aqua Metals and its three co-founders — Stephen Clarke, Selwyn Mould and Tom Murphy — was dismissed at the end of November in the court of judge Haywood Gilliam of the Northern District of California.
The court granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss, holding that the plaintiffs — Plymouth County Retirement Association and Denis Taillefer, and 1103371 Ontario Ltd — failed to plead any actionable material misstatements or scienter [knowingly committing a wrongdoing].
The plaintiffs brought this securities class action “on behalf of investors who purchased or otherwise acquired common stock of Aqua Metals” between May 19, 2016 and November 9, 2017,
According to the court record, the plaintiffs had alleged that the company and three senior officials had ‘made materially false and misleading statements concerning the company’s novel recycling technology and its commercialization process’.
In a second complaint, the plaintiffs had alleged that the company “failed to disclose the problems the company experienced in attempting to scale up its technology for commercialization, misrepresented the commercialization timeline, misrepresented the production efficacy of its recycling program and related revenues, and issued misleading statements concealing the challenges of the new technology.”
The plaintiffs had claimed that the company knew of ‘significant problems’ with its recycling technology, “which included issues related to scaling for commercialization, and misleadingly ‘stage’ investor and analyst visits to misrepresent the success of the company’s commercialization operations.”
In rejecting the claims, the court said the plaintiffs had failed to adequately put forward their arguments, and that the alleged misstatements by Aqua Metals were protected as forwardlooking statements and therefore as statements of opinion were non-actionable and not false.
The courts said that while Aqua Metals had claimed success in testing its technology, it had given no assurance that it would be able to replicate the process on a commercial scale.
“The plaintiffs failed to adequately allege that such statements were false or misleading and were otherwise non-actionable statements of corporate optimism or puffery,” the court said.
LS Energy takes on Fludder, Lin from NEC Energy Solutions
Solaredge sees in the new year with two appointments
Steve Fludder and Roger Lin have joined LS Energy, the former Energy Grid Tie division of Parker Hannifin now owned by Korean multi-billion-dollar group LS Group, from NEC Energy Solutions, the company announced on October 27.
The appointments of Fludder as CEO and Lin as VP of marketing and strategy have been made four months after NEC Energy Solutions began to wind down operations, according to Bloomberg, which in June said it had long been struggling to make a profit and had started an ‘orderly wind down’ in lieu of finding a buyer.
Fludder, who resigned from the company in June, said at the time that the pandemic and its economic upheaval made finding a buyer for the company difficult.
He had been made chairman at NEC three years ago, taking over from NEC’s chairman and temporary CEO Hiro Exawa in November 2017.
Fludder’s career includes four years as chief marketing and sales officer with Samsung Engineering and CEO of Alpha-En Corporation, a New York-based clean energy firm.
He has also worked in several of GE’s businesses across Asia over a 27-year term with the company, including five years as vice president and corporate officer.
Roger Lin was head of Global Marketing, Strategy and Product with NEC, where he worked for six years.
Before that he spent nine years with A123 Systems, which in 2014 was bought by Japanese giant NEC Corp and became NEC Energy Solutions.
Lin is also on the board of the US Energy Storage Association.
Steve Fludder Roger Lin
New Evergy CEO David Campbell starts in January
The US utility Evergy has appointed David Campbell as CEO and president effective January 4, the firm said on December 8. Outgoing Terry Bassham, who announced his retirement in August, remained in post until Campbell took over.
Evergy is a fairly new company, having been formed in 2018 when local energy providers KCP&L and Westar Energy merged. It has about 1.6 million customers.
Campbell has a lot of experience in the energy and utility sector, with 15 years in senior leadership positions. His most recent post was as executive vice president and CFO with Vistra Corporation, a multi-state power generator and provider headquartered in Texas with around 5 million customers.
Before Vistra, Campbell was CEO of Luminant, a large power generator in Texas.
Campbell joins Evergy four months after it announced its five-year Sustainability Transformation Plan, which aims to reduce costs for its customers with better grid reliability and security and accelerate the company’s transition to clean energy.
“I join Evergy with a shared drive and commitment to provide customers with clean, affordable, reliable and secure energy to power their lives, while driving sustainable, superior value for shareholders,” said Campbell.
SehWoong Jeong
Israel-headquartered smart energy firm SolarEdge has hired SehWoong Jeong as CEO of its battery subsidiary Kokam, as well as appointing Yogev Barak as chief marketing officer of SolarEdge, the company said on December 23.
Described by SolarEdge as an ‘industry veteran’, Jeong has joined the firm from Samsung Electronics, where he was appointed general manager and executive vice president for Automotive Batteries and ESS in 2014.
He had worked for Samsung in various positions for two decades, after nine months at Motorola at the beginning of his career.
In September Kokam launched a UPS battery system for mission-critical facilities. It makes batteries and energy storage systems for applications in sectors including aerospace, grid storage, industrial and electric vehicles.
Yogev Barak has worked in international marketing and B2B product management for a quarter of a century, most recently at HP Indigo, where he was head of strategy, marketing, products and business management.
He worked for HP Indigo for 14 years and before that spent 13 years in a variety of jobs with Applied Materials.
For the record in October Exide Technologies now stands alone as a European and Asia-Pacific firm, under new ownership but retaining Stefan Stübing as president, CEO and director.
Joe Hinrichs, recently retired as president of Ford Motor Company’s global automotive business, has been appointed chairman of the board.
The transaction involved separating the battery manufacturer from Exide Holdings, in the US, and transferring the entire business to a group of long-term shareholders under the new Energy Technologies Holdings — also in the US.
“As part of this transaction, the business received further multi-million-dollar funding from the new investors,” a statement said.
“Now, as a standalone, we are more agile,” said Stübing. “It will allow us to react even faster to the wishes of our customers and requirements of the market. The new owners represent a group of Exide’s long-term noteholders and know us well, thereby demonstrating their continued commitment to our success.”
Hinrichs said: “Together, we are confident in Exide’s capability to deliver consistent growth and profitability by bringing to market innovative energy storage technologies to benefit our customers.”
The new Exide will be headquartered near Paris.
Batteries International broke the news in June 2019 that Exide was selling its European business a year before it was officially announced.
Joe Hinrichs
The company had already been through two Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings and ultimately the North American part could not survive a third, with the recycling site at Vernon a constant thorn in its side and then Covid-19 driving in the final nail.
Now the European business is free to focus on its automotive and industrial energy storage technologies, with two R&D facilities and 11 production
CBI promotes Niamh Owen-McLaughlin
Niamh Owen-McLaughlin was promoted to communications and digital manager for the Consortium for Battery Innovation at the end of December.
She was previously communications officer for the consortium when it was restructured and rebranded from the previous ALABC in early 2019. The CBI is part of the International Lead Association where she started in 2013.
In particular OwenMcLaughlin has been developing the CBI’s presence in social media which has started to become an important forum for advancing CBI communications.
“We have a story to tell about the significant role lead batteries are playing and will continue to play in the global transition to a low carbon future — social media is a fantastic forum to share this and generate a buzz around lead battery innovation,” she says.
“CBI has been ramping up our efforts in this area to share the messages of innovation in lead batteries underway through our research programme and the work of our members. From short videos explaining scientific research to GIFs highlighting the role of lead batteries for energy storage, the content possibilities on social media are vast.” plants in Europe.
The company says it achieved a turnover of €1.4 billion ($1.65 billion) in the fiscal year for 2020.
East Penn wins Most Valuable Supplier for sixth consecutive year
East Penn has won the Most Valuable Supplier award for 2020 from the Material Handling Equipment Distributors Association for the sixth year in a row, as well as marking 45 years since joining the trade association.
“We are extremely proud of both accomplishments,” said Doug Bouquard, general manager and VP of sales, motive division. “They are a testament to our partnership with MHEDA, our employees, our independently owned North American dealer network, and the customers we serve.”
The award is handed out to companies that can demonstrate a commitment to business excellence in industry advocacy; distributor advocacy; business networking; continuing education; and best business practices.
Based in Chicago, MHEDA has around 600 members from the material handling sector, and provides services to them through education, networking, benchmarking and information on best practices.
