The new alliance is an important development for both companies, drawing on an existing relationship between the Ball family, owners of Elta Group and the Ziehl family, owners of Ziehl-Abegg, which goes back over quarter of a century.

The 17 strong team from Elta met senior representatives of Ziehl-Abegg during their stay, including CEO Peter Fenkl; Vice President Sales (Ventilation Division) Thomas Brommer; Area Sales Manager Gebhard Schafer; UK MD Les Fish and UK Sales Executive Phil Gretton.

The visit started with a tour of Ziehl’s factory in Bieringen, a small village in the Rottenburg am Neckar region of Germany, used principally for the manufacture of aluminium die-cast axial fans. This was followed by a visit to the nearby manufacturing facility in Wurzburgerstrasse where the EC electric motors are produced and then on to the factory in Waldenburg in which radial fans, process fans and cross-flow fans are manufactured. There was also time for some sight-seeing and a tour of the famous Mercedes Benz musuem in Stuttgart.

David Ball, Vice Chairman of the Elta Group, said – “It brought back some very fond memories for me as I spent many of my formative years as a young man in the area, as my father Ray Ball spent a great deal of time with Ziehl-Abegg over the years. It was an excellent opportunity for the team to see how Ziehl-Abegg operates and to witness first-hand the quality of the manufacturing for which Ziehl are renowned. Like Elta Group, Ziehl-Abegg is very much a family business, the owners being Uwe Ziehl, grandson of the founder Emil Ziehl, and Uwe Ziehl’s two children, the great granddaughter and great grandson of the founder Emil Ziehl. We look forward to working closely with Ziehl in the coming months to ensure that we, and more importantly our customers, are well placed to meet the challenges of the new European legislation on energy and climate change.”

Joining David on the visit was David Osgerby, MD of Elta, along with various employees from the Elta Group and Elta – including technical, marketing, operations and sales – to ensure that all functional areas of the Elta Group business that will be involved in the new range of products were represented.

Jenna Chambers, Marketing Services Manager at the Elta Group said – “We all benefited from seeing the Ziehl operation in action. Talking to people like Gebhard Schafer, who has worked at Ziehl for 35 years and who guided us on the factory tours, gave us a real insight into the company and what opportunities there are now that this alliance has been established.”

To mark the visit, during the tour of the Bieringen factory everyone signed a FE2owlet impeller, a key component in a new range of fans. This impeller will be mounted to take pride of place in the reception of the Elta Building Services Office in the West Midlands.

Elta is part of the Elta Group, a £85 million family of businesses with operations in six countries on four continents which, together with a network of international distributors, provides quality fans and related air movement equipment to customers worldwide.

Having travelled around the world, Neil originally went to The Gambia in 2004 and with the aid of a guide ventured into remote areas where the children were extremely passionate about English football, as he explains:

“I sat and watched local children play a game of football between two areas of a town called Bakau. Most of the kids had no football boots and were barefoot, the ball was threadbare and their clothes were almost rags, but they were very happy and asked lots of questions about the English premier League.”