Left to right: Gustavo Cruz, senior electronics engineer; David Lenehan, managing director; Alejandro Núñez, key account manager; Antonio Ulloa, country manager

Northern Industrial, one of the UK’s largest suppliers of industrial spare parts and proactive maintenance solutions, has announced significant expansion plans for its Mexico operations, where it has launched as NI Controls. Northern Industrial, a multi-award-winning international provider of new, reconditioned and obsolete parts and repair services, first opened an office in Mexico City in December 2020, its first location outside the UK prior to launching its German site earlier this year.

The company has now launched fully in Mexico under the brand NI Controls and moved into new, fully equipped premises in Querétaro where it is looking to boost its workforce further to make Mexico the central hub for the Americas. Established in the UK over 40 years, Northern Industrial exports industrial spare parts and repair services to manufacturing and engineering companies around the world. The company’s central operation in the UK stocks over 200,000 parts numbers, sourced from over 1,350 manufacturers.

As well as providing new replacement parts from manufacturers including Control Techniques, Beijer, Siemens,Danfoss and Pixsys, the company specialises in providing obsolete spare parts and repairs solutions primarily for industrial equipment and production lines no-longer supported by OEMs.

Its specialist buying department sources and refurbishes obsolete parts from across the world, which are sold via its multilingual website and customer service team, with express distribution worldwide. It also recently launched a new division dedicated to the recovery and refurbishment of semiconductors in response to the global semiconductor shortage.

Sixth successive year of growth
Exporting to over 146 countries, Northern Industrial provided vital spare parts and repair services to over 4,000 companies in 2021 alone. Recent years have seen year-on-year growth in demand for the UK company, which last year celebrated its sixth successive year of growth, with a 20% increase in sales compared to the previous year.

Opening to help meet ongoing increases in demand, the Mexican site will aim to equal, and potentially exceed, the UK operation, focussing on servicing customers across both North and South America. NI Controls’ new 470nm² site in Santiago Queretaro provides workshop space for 15 engineers with fully equipped test benches, cleaning room, and supplies warehouse and high-speed despatch facilities as well as commercial offices spaces housing the global sales, purchasing, pricing, marketing, and administration teams.

The space will have capacity to stock approximately 6,000 components and the company is expecting to ship around 240 service and repair orders from the new facilities in the coming months of August and September 2022.

Country manager Antonio Ulloa said: “We are immensely proud and excited to be expanding NI Controls in Mexico as a central hub for the whole of the Americas. These new facilities will benefit our delivery time and service for the American automation market and consolidate NI Controls’ internationalisation programme. The success of the UK company shows there is a massive need for the products and services we offer.”

Northern Industrial managing director David Lenehan said: “A recent global study showed the majority of companies across the world have experienced at least one unplanned period of downtime over the previous three years, costing an average $260,000 an hour across all businesses. The Vanson Bourne global study, sponsored by ServiceMax, from GE Digital, surveyed 450 companies in the UK, the USA, France and Germany, across the manufacturing, medical, oil and gas, energy and utilities, telecoms, distribution, logistics and transport sectors.

“As well as estimating downtime losses to average $2,000,000 per year for 82% of businesses, it also concluded that around 70% of companies lack full awareness of when their equipment is due for maintenance, upgrade or replacement.

“Northern Industrial has been established and is continuing to grow by providing the spare parts and repair services companies worldwide need to avoid costly downtime, and so we are really excited to be expanding this operation in Mexico to further improve the speed of our spare parts delivery and repairs services for American customers during stressful breakdown situations, while also providing solutions for preventative maintenance.”