Little Rock fan-maker teams with Germans

A 100-year-old Little Rock manufacturing company announced Tuesday that it is forming a joint venture with a German firm to produce centrifugal fans for the U.S. market.

Phelps Fan, which has been manufacturing fans since 1915 in Little Rock, has formed a new company in partnership with Reitz Ventilatoren of Hoxter, Germany. Reitz Ventilatoren is owned by the Reitz Group, which manufactures fans through nine subsidiaries in 11 countries.

The new venture, Reitz-Phelps Fan, will manufacture centrifugal fans for a broad range of light and heavy industrial users.

"We're equal partners in this new venture," said Joe Hadden, president of Phelps Fan. "This will be a completely separate entity that will allow us to serve a lot of new markets."

Phelps, in southwest Little Rock off Interstate 30, is a privately held company with more than $5 million in revenue and about 40 employees. It operates in a 40,000-square-foot facility that Hadden estimates it likely will outgrow when Reitz-Phelps hits its stride over the next year.

"We're going to ramp up very quickly," Hadden said. "The potential for growth with this joint venture is substantially better than what we can do on our own, or what we've done in the past 15 years."

Reitz today has German and European customers with operations in the United States that have been clamoring for centrifugal fans. "One of the reasons they wanted to make this push is because their customers have asked them," Hadden said.

He estimates that Reitz-Phelps Fan can achieve $1 million in additional revenue over the next year. With that, the company likely will add jobs and need a new manufacturing and sales facility. "Ultimately, we expect to outgrow our [existing] facility," Hadden said.

Phelps Fan now serves the heavy end of the industrial marketplace: the steel, cement, glass, fiberglass and pollution control sectors. Reitz produces industrial fans for the power generation, chemical, pharmaceutical, plastics, petrochemical, iron and steel sectors.

"These guys are very aggressive and they see a lot of potential for growth in the U.S. market," Hadden said of his new partners.

The joint venture provides more opportunity to manufacture centrifugal fans for lighter industrial uses, including textiles, dryers, heaters, coolers and boilers as well as street sweepers.

Frank Phelps and his son, Morton, started the company at 715 Thomas St. in a former cotton gin factory and produced fans for cotton gins. The company developed the four-speed attic fan in the 1940s to enhance residential and commercial ventilation. The Phelps family remains part of the ownership group today.

Business on 01/08/2020

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