2018 Investments : Excerpt from «L’Usine Nouvelle» January 2018

To enhance its competitiveness, sustainably protect its industrial work tools and improve its staff’s working conditions, La Fonte Ardennaise is going to invest 5.5 million euros in 2018 to modernise its infrastructures by acquiring machining units, several digitally controlled lathes, three-dimensional machines, deburring machines and an LB 25 robotised coring machine. The company employs 780 employees and 40 temp agency workers in its six plants based in the Ardennaises at Vivier-au-Court, Vrigne-aux-Bois and Haybes.

This flagship of the metallurgy sector, which achieved a turnover of 126 million (+ 13 %) in 2017, will extend its Vivier-au-Court (Ardennes) foundry by erecting a 1,500 m² building to improve production flows. It will also replace a filter and a cupola furnace intake and will improve process control using a thermal analysis system.

"In capital asset trades such as foundry and milling, we have to permanently invest and adapt our production tools to new technology so that we are as competitive as possible", says Nicolas Grosdidier, the La Fonte Ardennaise CEO.

An international group employing 1,300 people:

With its units in the Ardennes, its factories in Redon (Ille-et-Vilaine) and La Flèche (Sarthe) and its subsidiaries in Kikinda (Serbia) and Seville (Spain), the La Fonte Ardennaise group covers five foundries, three milling plants, one assembly plant and one surface treatment plant, and employs 1,300 people. The group also produces 100,000 tonnes of rough, painted and assembled foundry parts per year with a turnover of 222 million euros of which 56 % exported.

La Fonte Ardennaise strives to meet the requirements of order givers in nine strategic sectors: automotive, industrial vehicles, transmissions, pumps and valves, heating, compressors, capital assets, public works and agriculture.

This investment policy is also implemented in the SED, MECAFOR, AFC and LFA ESPANA subsidiaries, thus taking the 2018 investment programme to over 9 million Euros.