European Furnace Builder Sells to Chinese Company

The big news of the month which we announced yesterday was the sale of the HTC Group, which includes four companies – IVA Schmetz (Germany), Mahler (Germany), Fours Industriels B.M.I. (France) and IVA Schmetz Industrial Furnaces (Shanghai) (China) – to a Chinese company by the name of Qizhi GmbH and Shanghai Qizhi Information Technologies Co., Ltd. We alluded to this sale back in April of this year when we had the rumor below (obviously this acquisition took a lot longer than any party anticipated). Each of the Tennova companies involved in the sale are well known, top end suppliers of heat treating furnaces, mainly in Europe and Asia. Mahler is best known for continuous  furnaces, BMI for vacuum furnaces and IVA Schmetz for Sealed Quench furnaces and vacuum nitriders. This marks the first time as far as we can recollect that we have seen an Asian company buy a substantial “western” furnace builder. It will be interesting to see if anything changes in the company. For our North American readers we have to say that each of these brands are not well known in the USA, Canada or Mexico although each company has a few installations in North America. As an example we include this photo of a BMI furnace in Quebec which was recently installed.  

“April 2019 News Item; Betcha you have never heard of Shanghai Qizhi Information Technology Co., Ltd., based in Ningbo, China before-we certainly hadn’t. If you are curious about the company you can get all the details at http://www.qijing-m.com/En/INTRODUCTION.html which will tell you it is a large conglomerate which produces auto parts, power tools, washing machines, home appliances and a host of other items. What the website does not tell you is that supposedly in the near future the company will be able to add vacuum furnaces to their list of products. This by the way fits very neatly with what the company does as they already have a large heat treating operation featuring sealed quench furnaces. If our information is correct they have just reached an agreement to buy a European manufacturer of vacuum furnaces and we will be telling you all about it.