3/5/2014

Units to operate under new name: APS Elastomers

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By Chris Sweeney Follow Author

ROMULUS, Mich.—Alliance Polymers and Services L.L.C. and APS Compounding L.L.C. will operate under a new name: APS Elastomers.

The firm said the merger reflects the companies' enhanced focus on distribution of thermoplastic elastomers, its vast technical expertise in TPEs and its ability to compound customer-specific materials. The new entity will provide expedited shipments and full laboratory services.

APS Elastomers will operate under the direction of Roger Hurang and Stephane Morin—the principal owners and founders of Alliance Polymers.

"We kind of morphed the two together and renamed it APS Elastomers to better reflect what we're all about," Morin said. "We are a distributor of only theromoplastic elastomers, but we are also capable of compounding, fine tuning and improving by reprocessing. That was the APS Compounding portion of our business."

Alliance Polymers and Services started purely as a distributor of thermoplastic elastomers, but over time it started to evolve into creating its own product lines to offer to the market. APS Compounding started in 2011 as a separate operation to develop private label products for Alliance Polymers.

"By creating our own private labels, we started to gain a bit more control of the manufacturing or the specification that we wanted," Morin said. "We also targeted the North American market with more competitive pricing for these materials."

Morin said the company will continue to focus on elastomers and look to add a couple of product lines to its portfolio. One of these will be a fluoropolymer.

"As our customers started to be a bit more demanding as to what they wanted in their materials, we started making more and more of these custom products for them," Morin said. "We can do all the technical work and do the compounding to sell them the product that they really need."

Morin said APS Elastomers is planning to add a few technicians to the compounding side of the business because the firm is seeing more business come that way.

"We have always had a strategy of expanding from the compounding side, but if an opportunity to do an acquisition comes across, we would certainly look at it," Morin said.