Ammeraal Beltech, leading worldwide developers and manufacturers of process and conveyor belting, headquartered in Alkmaar, the Netherlands, announces that it has acquired conveyor belt specialist Optiband BV.

Optiband is located in Numansdorp, in the south-west of the Netherlands and was founded by co-owners Aart Groenendijk and Harry Grimberg 27 years ago.

The goal of this acquisition is to increase Ammeraal Beltech’s penetration in the Dutch market. Like other recent acquisitions, Optiband has a strong focus on service, quality and customer intimacy, which matches perfectly the strategy of Ammeraal Beltech.

Both co-owners are very committed to integrate all of Optiband activities into the Dutch Ammeraal Beltech organization and to further grow the business.

Piet Herder, Managing Director of the Dutch operating company: “Please join us in warmly welcoming Optiband into the Global AB Team, and wish them a lot of future success to help Ammeraal Beltech strengthen its position in the Dutch market.”

Partners Group, the global private markets investment manager, who recently agreed to acquire Ammeraal Beltech from Advent International, has just announced that they have agreed to acquire Megadyne Group, a leading manufacturer of power transmission belts, from Astorg.

Once the acquisitions of Ammeraal and Megadyne have closed later this year, subject to anti-trust clearances and other regulatory approvals, Partners Group would in a next step plan to support a merger of the two companies, which have highly complementary product and service offerings.

The potential merger between Ammeraal and Megadyne would be to the benefit of our customers. It would create a full service industry champion across specialist industrial transmission belting and lightweight conveyor belting, further strengthening cornerstones of our business strategy: our One-Stop Belt Shop concept and customer proximity for optimised service.

Since its founding in 1950, Ammeraal Beltech’s goal has always been to offer its customers the highest levels of customer service, industry expertise and product quality. This potential merger would leverage the mutual synergies of both organisations to create higher customer value and has the support of the Management Teams of both organisations.

Rest assured that meanwhile, the global Ammeraal Beltech team will remain focused and dedicated to serving our customers.

You can read the full Press Release from Partners Group by visiting their website.

Ammeraal Beltech announces an improvement for this young star in multi-directional ball belting…

At LogiMAT 2018, global belting specialists Ammeraal Beltech will feature an important innovation for their leading-edge multi-directional uni QNB Ball Belt, which was introduced at last year’s show, and already a huge contributor to improved performance in a variety of tasks in intralogistics, materials handling, packaging and manufacturing.

To fine-tune uni QNB Ball Belt’s efficiency in today’s ever-increasing colorimetry and video sorting applications, the belt’s integrated rotating closed ball construction – at a surface density of 1550 per square meter – is now supplied in one single default standard colour: blue. ‘This’, says Norman Gill, Ammeraal Beltech’s former* Logistics Industry Segment Manager, ‘is a major simplification and time-saver for today’s logistics businesses, eliminating the need to define different measurements for different colours of balls. Belt speed can be slowed at defined points for such key tasks today as inspection using colour definition sensors for precise location of the products on the belt, or in video sorting systems. Here, the introduction of a standard belt colour adds extra speed and accuracy to process operations. In other words, a single colour of ball across all your production lines means you need just one standard measurement basis.’

In partnership with a number of industry-specific tracking and control systems, the blue balls’ movement can also be precisely activated or deactivated to allow goods to be aligned, rotated, sorted, accumulated, or separated to order, with acceleration and deceleration of conveyor speed appropriately controlled. Auxiliary belts may be added to create additional spheres of product movement – turning them round, or transferring them from left to right, for example.

‘We expect to attract considerable interest in this innovation at LogiMAT 2018’, adds Norman Gill. ‘It’s certainly blue chip!’

Along with Norman Gill, Ammeraal Beltech specialists will be on hand at LogiMAT to demonstrate relevant features of the company’s broader product range that make up its ‘One-Stop belt shop’. These include solutions for specific intralogistics needs such as low-noise solutions, flame-retardant and anti-static materials to minimise fire risk, and impact-, abrasion- and temperature-resistant conveying solutions.

*Update: Norman Gill is Ammeraal Beltech’s former Industry Segment Manager for the Logistics Industry.