Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/712650
52 The PCB Magazine • August 2016 small company with sales, customer service, en- gineering, and applications. You could say it's the front door or the store window for Eltek LTD in the U.S. It allows us to bring in military and aerospace work into Eltek USA and bring it to Eltek Israel through our ITAR export license to build for U.S. customers. Matties: And you're the president of the Eltek USA? Barry: That is correct. Matties: What is your main area of responsibility? Barry: I wear many different hats. My responsi- bility is for the sales in the United States, engi- neering, customer service, and basically bring- ing the work into the factory, filling the factory, making sure our customers are happy. We have a strong technical sense here. I'm a veteran in the industry for 38 years, have run many com- panies, and have been in executive manage- ment as well as engineering management. Matties: With the investment coming back into the organization, there must be a lot of confidence and growth. Barry: Yes, absolutely. Matties: What sort of growth are you guys looking at? Barry: In 2015, our sales in the North Ameri- can market increased by 27% and amounted to $7.5 million. This represents approximately 18% of the company's overall revenue, but the long-term plan is to grow it further. Since we are a public company, I cannot get into projected numbers. My personal goal in the U.S. is to get us to much higher figures in the next number of years. I don't want to put a number on it, but we have an aggressive growth plan. Matties: Let's talk a little bit about the military market, ITAR, and how you're able to manufacture offshore. That's a tricky business, I would think. Barry: Yes, it is. Eltek USA is a USA company, so we're registered with the Department of State. We have our DTC registration. The Department of State has approved our technical control plan, and we actually have a license, it's called an MLA, a manufacturing licensing agreement, which is a 10-year license. The license is actu- ally between Eltek USA and Eltek Israel. So you as a U.S. customer would buy from Eltek USA; we are the name of record on the export, so we control the data. It comes to us, we sanitize as necessary, we upload using an encrypted file system to Israel, they manufacture and we ship back to the United States customer. In the past 13 years, we've shipped probably close to $67 million into the United States and at least 40% of that has been military/aerospace work. We deal with a number of Tier 1 compa- nies. I don't want to state names of my custom- ers without getting their prior permission, but we deal with a lot of the major Tier 1 companies and some of our products are missile system- related, night vision goggles-related, aerospace controls, etc. We also do a tremendous amount in the medical field for implantable medical devices. The reason being, Eltek is known to be one of the highest reliability companies out there in the industry today. We tend to take on the challenges that nobody else either wants or can figure out. Matties: When the ownership took over a couple years ago, you were talking about underperform- ing, no profitability, and losses. Cycle time or deliv- ery time must have been a factor in that. ELTEK LOOKING FOR STRONG GROWTH IN THE USA