The Schaefer Group

THE SCHAEFER GROUP Ohio, Perrysburg, Ohio, Louisville, Kentucky, and another just recently opened facility in Knoxville, Tennessee. In the past year, The Schaefer Group has expanded their portfolio through some very interesting strategic agreements and acquisitions. National Sales Manager, David White, a 39-year veteran with the company, shares the details. “First off, we signed an agreement last year with Sanken Sangyo Furnace Co. out of Japan, allowing us to sell their tower melters, which is a different style of melting furnace than we’ve ever built before. It involves a large tower attached to a melting furnace. Basically, they put all their scrap in the tower and the exhaust gases go up through the stack and preheat everything prior to it being melted on a hearth and then draining into a holding furnace.” The Schaefer Group had been looking at building these, themselves, when Sanken approached them and said, “We need a partner in the U.S. because we have a few furnaces here already and we want to sell more. We need someone to install and/or build them.” So, in December 2018, Schaefer signed a licensee agreement allowing them to market and sell the Sanken tower furnaces in the United States and Canada. The partnership has been great for Schaefer, opening up a whole new market of customers who want to buy those types of melters. The main advantage is they are very low in energy usage because you’re preheating everything before melting. And they take up less space than a conventional large melter. But the Group isn’t jumping right into manufacturing the tower units. The first couple will be built in sections by Sanken in Japan and sent to Schaefer to put together onsite, do the start-up, and then the after-market sales. White clarifies, “Once we get a couple under our belt, they’re going to send us drawings and we’ll build them ourselves. In August 2017, we moved from a 33,000-sq.-ft. facility to a 96,000-sq.-ft. facility in Beavercreek, so we actually have the space to build these in. We’re in a suburb of Dayton, and we give Dayton as our address because no one has heard of Beavercreek - that is until this past Memorial Day, when we had a tornado touch down