NUM Expands Presence With New South Korean Office

This fourth Asian office for the CNC vendor results directly from its core business strategy of placing skilled applications engineering resources at the disposal of customers to help them develop market-winning machine solutions.

NUM (Naperville, IL) has opened a subsidiary for applications support, sales and after-sales service in Seoul, South Korea, to serve the country’s growing market for CNC machine tools.

This is the fourth Asian office for the CNC vendor and results directly from the company’s core business strategy of placing skilled applications engineering resources at the disposal of customers to help them develop market-winning machine solutions.

South Korea is the third largest economy in Asia, and is highly export-driven. The country has a diverse manufacturing base of indigenous, local and international companies, with a particularly strong presence in the electronics, semiconductor, automotive, shipbuilding, machine tools and luxury products markets, as well as a flourishing financial services sector.

The high number of machine builders and machine tool OEMs in South Korea – the country is close to becoming the fourth largest producer, and user, of machine tools in the world – demonstrates the long term stability and sustainability of the CNC market in this part of Asia.

Until now, NUM has supported its customers in the region from its facilities in Switzerland and Taiwan. With its growing number of Korean customers, NUM decided to invest directly in the local infrastructure to ensure that it continues to provide professional and responsive services.

As Robert von Arx, NUM’s director of business development, explains, “South Korea’s amazing manufacturing success is continually creating opportunities for its machine builders, many of which are small to medium size companies with limited engineering resources. However, bigger sized enterprises often face similar issues. Our new subsidiary can support such companies, enabling them to seize their chances. We will help them to tailor CNC systems to suit their particular applications, to create unique machinery solutions, and get to market more rapidly.”

Machine tools currently manufactured in South Korea cover a wide range of applications, including laser cutting, drilling, grinding, gear hobbing, etc., which are all areas where NUM has expert knowledge. Many of these machine tools are designed for highly specialized purposes, and are characterized by their need for complex and extensively customized control systems – making CNC the obvious first-choice for designers.

However, due to limited development time, it is often only with the experienced help of companies such as NUM that they can progress a design from concept through to production.

NUM’s new South Korean applications support, sales and after-sales service facility is a 100 percent NUM owned subsidiary. This has significant advantages for customers, as von Arx points out, “As well as having representatives throughout the Asia-Pacific region, NUM also operates four wholly-owned subsidiaries – two in mainland China, one in Taiwan and now one in South Korea.

“Each of these subsidiaries can provide dedicated applications engineering support and is capable of developing customized software and hardware,” he continues. “As a result, we expect our South Korean customers to benefit considerably. We plan to highlight some of these advantages on our booth at next year’s SIMTOS exhibition in Seoul – one of the world’s leading manufacturing technology shows.”

www.num.com