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MILAN, Italy – A true synergy of focus and people is the key to the success of Innovamat Srl, a joint venture undertaken last year between Italy’s Quartz Srl and Spain’s Rimsa, according to Mario Cotilli, co-CEO of the new firm
The company’s website spells it out: “Innovamat Srl is a new company born from the collaboration of two well-renowned manufacturers of additives for friction materials, Quartz and Rimsa, Rimsa and Quartz, taking advantage of the synergies in between the capabilities of both companies to provide innovative solutions through innovative products to the friction industry, and beyond. We truly believe than the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
“This is easy to say, but difficult to do,” said Cotilli during an interview he, Daniel Carbajo, the other co-CEO, and Carlos Lorenzana, Rimsa technical director, recently had with The BRAKE Report. “We will operate with same culture.”
“Both companies (Rimsa and Quartz) are family-owned,” said Carbajo. “Both have similar methods of operating.”
They were both careful to explain this a full 50/50 joint venture, with no overlapping of operations. And they both said innovative products will be the objective of Innovamat
The initial products are aimed at improving the friction material which makes up such a major component in braking systems.
They said, “Our main goal is to help the friction community to become independent of additives based on metals listed in the stock market or with very fluctuating prices (like Tin Sulfide, Antimony Trisulfide and Copper sulfide are). Our initial catalog includes a comprehensive range of synthetic sulfides, produced with state-in-the-art technology, and designed to allow customers to quickly achieve the replacement of their legacy additives.”
The company has already begun producing and selling the products to customers in Asia, America, and Europe, and many others are in the testing phase.
The customer benefits, according to them, “are clear: Have a more competitive formulation through a better cost-to-performance sulfide. We are used to working close to the customer, we learn together. And we are long-distance runners. But stronger as we are together, we want to also provide some very short-term benefits. Switching to a new sulfide always implies development costs for the customer. This is because the need for testing and characterization needed for the correlation of the engineering results with materials science results. With our own testing and characterization facilities, we can provide to customers early screening tests on a wider range of conditions before devoting time of their dynos for testing.”
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