In celebration of its 60th anniversary of operating in North America, Marposs Corp. hosted an open house at its regional headquarters in Auburn Hills, Mich. In addition to showcasing its latest precision measuring equipment, company officials detailed several recent acquisitions and their plans for the future.
“Over the years our focus has been on continuous growth and diversification,” Marposs President Ed Vella said during opening remarks to journalists and customers.
Founded in 1952 in Bologna, Italy, by Mario Possati, Maposs provides a range of process controls, measurement and inspection technologies across various industrial sectors and automatic assembly and control lines. “The solution can be something as small as a sensor or as large as an entire product or device,” Vella said, noting that the company has complete assembly lines that can be customized to meet customer needs.
When the company began expanding globally, the initial focus was on machine tools. More recently, Marposs has increasingly delved into new technologies and grown its research and development capabilities.
For electric vehicles, for example, Marposs provides a range of solutions for batteries and the electric drive unit (motor, stator, rotor, transmission and housing). This includes contact and non-contact gauging, machine vision, leak testing, automation and leak testing.
Another emerging market is the global semiconductor industry, which Marposs has been involved with since 1980. The company’s gauges and sensors are used to improve the performance of automatic machines used during wafer processing, as well as front- and back-end fabrication steps.
Most recently, Marposs acquired Solarius Development Inc., a provider of high-tech manufacturing solutions for the consumer electronics and the semiconductor industry, in June. The acquisition expands Marposs' optical measurement solutions into the "back-end" phase of the production process, serving customers in the consumer electronics, green energy and semiconductor sectors.
“With the nanotechnology that Solarius’ quality control machines provide, we now have the capability to get the smallest measurements of seven nanometers,” said Basanagouda Patel, an application specialist at Marposs. These nano-measurements are used as part of the quality control process for semiconductors, automobile surface finishes and handling displays.
The 2021 purchase of Electrical Dynamic Co., meanwhile, added additional EV testing capabilities with the EDC LT-400, which checks for latency and anomalies in EV batteries. The device can perform all electrical tests with a single electronics unit, offering the ability to choose the desired test sequence.
Half of Marposs’ business is now derived from the EV sector, according to Vella. “That’s important for Detroit, the U.S. and our partners.”
Marposs’ recent acquisitions, combined with coordinated research and development at the group level, have expanded the company’s portfolio of products and solutions. “Part of what we do here is innovate, anticipate and integrate,” Vella said, adding that diversification helps the innovation process. “(And) part of anticipating our customers’ needs is being a global company.”
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