Hyundai WIA: Shooting for Top Five!

 

I had the pleasure of attending the Grand Opening of Hyundai WIA America Corp.’s West Coast Solution Center a few weeks ago. With several new machines recently launched, the company is now focusing on their reliable distribution network and building upon it—developing a southern California base for tech solutions with application engineers and manufacturing trained service personnel available to help customers solve their most challenging jobs.

The two-day Grand Opening Celebration began with a ribbon cutting ceremony by Hyundai WIA America's President, Mr. I.C. Lee, as well as the following Hyundai WIA management: Craig Krzyston, Sales Manager Southern California; Peter Histed, Executive Vice President; David Barber, Director of Marketing; Frank Tortorich, Director of Services and Daniel Royer, Regional Sales Manager.

I also had the opportunity to sit down with David Barber for a chat about the company’s short- and long-term plans. The facility itself features an impressive showroom that can hold up to eight CNC machine tools—on display and under power—for live demonstrations. These eight machines are specific to mold and die, aerospace and medical, which David said are all industries very important to manufacturing in Southern California. This showroom has been designed to help provide solutions to these specific solutions.

David told me that this will be a dual-purpose facility that will not only educate and train customers as well as the company’s distributors, but will also house a company-owned distributor of Hyundai WIA products just to cover Southern California. “We have defined it as one of the key markets we needed for growth to achieve our goal of being one of the top five selling brands in the Americas,” David explained. “Southern California is very important to us. We believe the only way to really make a good impact—and capture and grow our market share—was to actually create a company-owned distributorship and not a direct office. So it has its own manager, sales people and office staff just like our other distributors.”

As the company increases its West Coast presence, the next phase is to expand into an even bigger facility with an attached warehouse to equipment, supplies and parts can all be managed in one facility. In addition, the new showroom would have crane capabilities so the company can do a more full turnkey, David related. “Hopefully that will come within the next two years because we already ship about a third of all the machines coming in from Korea to this market,” he said. “We store them offsite by Long Beach and we want to ultimately have our own facility to do that just like we do in New Jersey.”

In 2014, HW plans to open a “green” Tech Center in Chicago, which David said will be a massive showroom with a solution center and multiple application engineers on hand to help Midwest customers and distributors better operate within their facilities. “In the interim, we may actually get a facility similar to this one to act as a Tech Center for Chicago,” David noted. “It will be a turnkey and training area only with no plans for storage right now.”

Long-term plans for Hyundai WIA include future plans for development in South America—another step in its quest toward being a top five brand in the Americas.