Exclusive: Joel Cox Dellner Bubenzer on ‘milestone company merger’

Joel Cox, president, Dellner Bubenzer USA, was part of a global leadership trio that executed the entire brand overhaul, including Friederike Imhäuser, marketing manager, Germany; and Edgar Roca, VP, Dellner Brakes, Texas.

In an exclusive video interview with Cox he speaks to Hoist about why the five companies decided to become one in a ‘milestone event it had been waiting to do for some time’.

“We wanted to wait until now because we wanted to put all the pieces together and do it in a way where we could all understand the philosophy of the company and the direction we wanted to go as well as having that multi-national feel and global footprint realised by all our team internally and externally,” he said.

“We also have many partners that have brought to the fold and understand our future vision.  We are happy with the outcome.”

In terms of the company background Pintsch Bubenzer acquired Dellner brakes (part of Dellner Group) in January 2018, in a deal that paved the way for the companies’ ongoing global expansion.

Pintsch Bubenzer makes high performance disc and drum brakes for cranes and other severe duty applications, as well as complementary products, such as emergency and storm brakes. Four months earlier, Dellner Brakes had acquired US brake and clutch company Gummi USA.

Momentum continued two years ago when Dellner Brakes, incorporating Italy’s Rima, bought German brake specialist JHS Jungblut in a move that immediately strengthened the company’s offering in the wind energy market, and enabled further global expansion, notably in the Far East. 

As part of the merger, Cox said his role will be to cover North and South America as a whole ensuring the two are tied together because in the past, Central and South America were covered in different ways and they have since grown their footprint there and brought in new people to handle those territories. Most recently Ezequiel Ivitz, as managing director, Latin America.

“More than ever my role is focusing on connecting the dots on everything from Canada to South America and everything in between. We’re very excited about the challenge and we have a great team, with further expansion in the future including in Texas where we will be bringing in some manufacturing there that we’ve never done before,” he added.

Cox said the reaction the new company and logo had been very positive.

“Internally, there was a lot of discussion (about the colour of the branding) because we’ve been known before for this red colour, Bubenzer was blue and Rima was blue JHS was green, so as we brought all this together we had a team that talked about it. We are really going back to our roots with this colour, and its fresh. We have been copied many times before but I think we will be the only ones with this colour for quite some time,” he said.

“Covid-19 played a little part in terms of us uniting. We were better prepared than most companies during the pandemic with web-based technology and helping our customers troubleshoot things remotely and on-site. As the five companies came together this was the plan from the beginning, putting all the pieces together and watching it unfold, but Covid brought us all closer together as a company and was the deciding factor when and why we needed to do it because we wanted to seem stronger and we needed to be unified as a brand.

“The reaction we are seeing is that people are very excited about the rebrand, ‘all the  hands, arms and limbs are talking to each other’, we have better communication than we’ve ever had before, we are having meetings that are happening with a real global feel that we have never had before and transactions and internal communications with manufacturing are going smoother. Our partners and representatives are very happy.

“The next steps are taking on new people. We hired someone in South America and now we are looking at strategic areas where we want to have someone to cover certain areas across the globe and we are about to announce some new things on that. We are looking forward to populating more of the brakes with the new colour scheme and logo. It’s nice to see a combined product offering under one umbrella, and we are about to launch some more hoisting applications with news on that in the coming weeks.”

Dellner Bubenzer will deliver a presentation to the AIST Crane Symposium, from August 15-17 at the Omni William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where Cox and Mike Astemborski, executive sales manager, will deliver a paper entitled, ‘Lifting or lowering a load safely after failure or incident’.

Read more about Dellner Bubenzer’s merger in this month’s Hoist Magazine August edition