Alteyco is an alliance between three companies from Deba, which has opted to increase its size in order to tackle the foreign market

"It is becoming more and more necessary to be closer to the customer"

In 2011 three companies from Deba, in the components for machine tools sector, created the Alteyco alliance to exploit synergies in the technical and commercial field and be able to tackle new markets. In this edition of the Exhibition, which opened yesterday at the BEC, this group of companies from Gipuzkoa has two exhibitors, as part of its awareness of the importance of continuing to focus on commercial promotion, despite the crisis.

José Angel Pérez, CEO of Alteyco, and his wife Itziar Tellería, manager of Tecnifuelle -one of the alliance companies along with Mosnic-Irudex and Alteyco System- explained to this newspaper yesterday that if these companies had not joined forces to form an alliance "we would have had serious problems during the economic crisis".

Alteyco -whose companies manufacture solutions for machine tools and other sectors, such as filters, fairings, telescopic guards, chip conveyors, winders and bellows- is currently immersed in a process of change. The alliance plans to undertake a major investment in robotics for casing welding and part assembly, as well as laser machinery, whilst it is also allocating significant resources to innovation and incorporating more professionals (technicians and engineers in collaboration with the Elgoibar Machine-Tool Institute) to its workforce, consisting of a hundred people between the three companies.

Perez stressed that the sector is "better than last year" but warned of "uncertainties" because "local companies are not competitive in price". According to the head of Alteyco, "It is often said that in the Basque Country we do things well, but that is not enough; you have to work more on building a close relationship with customers, which is becoming more and more necessary".

Alteyco has a plant in Sao Paulo (Irudex Brazil) with twenty workers, and another production facility with the Japanese firm Japan-Shinike in the Chinese city of Shanghai. Peréz noted that the alliance "is open to more companies operating in similar sectors and complementary activities". Pérez also indicated that the Deba business group will continue working to "continue to grow" as a way to gain competitiveness, which, he emphasised, "can only be achieved by improving the quality and the time in which things are manufactured, always with a close relationship with the customer".