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80 The PCB Magazine • October 2015 Kenney: MacDermid included, Barry. Two years ago, three years ago, we were in that same boat. We did not spend a lot of time in North Amer- ica. Matties: The technical services were really left up to the distributors who were handling mul- tiple lines with limited knowledge about each of them. Cullen: It's interesting, if you think about the big picture, because the suppliers went to Asia in a largely a proportionate way. Asia became most of the opportunity, and we brought most of our resources over there. Did we leave a pro- portionate amount in North America? Maybe. But did we leave critical mass? Since that time, we realized that we needed to bring that critical mass back to North America. That's really been a focused effort of ours. Matties: How's that process working? Cullen: It's working. In MacDermid's view in North America, I don't think that we really did rely on distribution as much as a lot of our competitors. The ability to bring that back gives better value to our customers in North America especially. We've been seeing benefits having done that. Kenn ey: Two years ago, when we went through the transition of being a private company to being acquired by Platform, it really stimulated the change. We knew that there were changes coming, and we knew that there were likely to be acquisitions made in that space, so we made a conscious decision to say, "How do we sell and service all geographies?"—with North America being one of those. We went back to a traditional MacDermid model, where we had dedicated sales and service people calling on the PCB marketplace, where we hadn't done that in five or six years. Our electronics resourc - es were kind of blended with our general metal- finishing business, and we tried to service the industry that way. We made a line-in-the-sand change two years ago, and said we would have a dedicated team, and we would have dedicated sales and service and strategic people handling the large accounts. We had a concerted effort on the mar- keting side to make sure the customers knew what the changes were that were taking place. It has made a big difference. We had not had great sales success in the previous four or five years in North America until we made this kind of line-in-the-sand change. We've seen a real turnaround. Matties: What sort of percentage are you talk- ing about, in the increase? Kenney: We had stagnant revenue for a five-to- six-year period. We stopped the slide last year; this year we're projected to be up significantly over last year, and most of it's not with a fast- growing market. Most of it is through our added value we bring to customers, where we're win- ning competitive battles. Matties: When you're with a customer today, what sort of demands do they ask you to address? Steve Kenney, business director, macDermid. CyCLE TIME REDUCTION FOR DOMESTIC AND GLOBAL CUSTOMERS FeATure inTervieW