Northern Composites

8 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 10 Recycling blades from old windmills is one such example, as Hewett notes. “There’s a lot of new technologies coming out, new products,” he says. “For us, the important thing is to stay relevant and to keep up with that. It’s quite a job.” Hewett himself enjoys investigating new products. If there’s a potential use within a Northern Composite product paradigm, and it’s something the company’s customers might find appealing, then they’ll pursue it further. Just recently the company commissioned a new “hot-knife” slitter in Greensboro. This will be used to slit PFG peel plies for our customers and perhaps for PFG as well. This is an important part of our continuing investment to increase our in-house capabilities “The industry in general, I think, is definitely on an upswing,” he says. “There’s no real question about that. Aerospace is bouncing back. COVID knocked everyone for six. It was a pretty good downturn, and we’re still feeling the effects of that as people use up inventory that accumulated as we came out of COVID. They were buying like crazy because they didn’t know what was going on. Now they find themselves with too much inventory. I think that will eventually wash out in 2024, and we’ll start to get into some solid growth.” At the end of the day, says Hewett, Northern Composite is firmly focused on service.