History of Norican

In September 2008, Wheelabrator Group and DISA Group merged to form Norican Group. The combination of DISA & Wheelabrator brought together two innovation leaders with a century of operating history each. Both were recognized as market leaders in their technical offering, with over 10,000 customers in a 100 countries across any industry requiring metallic parts.

We started our journey serving every tier of the automotive industry, beginning with iron foundries through to the Global OEMs, as well as a diverse and broad variety of industries from Aerospace, Agricultural & Earth Moving, Construction to Marine, Medical and Wind Energy.

Whether it's a broad technical application like peening (which cuts across most of the industries we served), or high speed molding applications for the iron foundries of the world, Norican is the partner of choice for customers around the world.

In 2016, in response to our customers’ customers changing needs around reduced greenhouse gas emissions and the need for increased fuel efficiency, Norican Group wanted to expand its technical offer: we wanted innovative technologies to build upon our existing technical platform while extending our expertise into the broadly defined lightweight market space. We found demonstrated experts in the Aluminium market space, in both ItalPresseGauss and StrikoWestofen. 

In May 2017, we proudly added both ItalPresseGauss and StrikoWestofen to the Norican technology portfolio.

Beginning with a core expertise in ferrous applications (both iron and steel), the addition of both ItalPresseGauss and StrikoWestofen have given Norican Group a step up into the non-ferrous (aluminum) technical offer being demanded by the market.

As we look to the future, we continue to actively discuss with our customers new ways to support their various strategic growth initiatives.   We are jointly exploring many exciting ideas in response to these customer-centric dialogues.   

2020 was among the most dramatic crisis' in a generation. The scale of the uncertainty we all had to deal with during the COVID pandemic, with abrupt pauses to business, industry, logistics and our lives, was completely unprecedented.

But we took action. We decided to be better, to be an agent of positive change.

In December 2021 we signed our commitment letter to the Science-Based Targets initiatives - making us the first among our peers to do so. During 2022 we developed both near-term emissions reduction and longer-term net zero targets with the help of SBTi guidance, which we officially submitted in 2023. The submission follows an intensive process of mapping, analysing and evaluating our direct and indirect emissions, and establishing a baseline to track progress against.

Norican Group will continue to grow as it has since its formation, based on a strict adherence to its core values;

• Lead for Sustainability
• Deliver on Commitments
• Respect Diversity & build upon Teamwork
• Develop Employee potential & excellence
  
  

These values are what guide us in all aspects of creating value for our customer, both internally and externally. While the technology and business offer may change over time as result of evolving market requirements, our core values will stand until the end of time.

Our next milestone was in the fall of 2022 when we acquired the 110-year-old Simpson brand, an expert in mixing, cooling, handling, reclamation and analysis of sand. For Norican, the acquisition was a natural extension of our complete foundry offering, strengthening our capabilities in sand preparation, reclamation and laboratory testing.

Testament to our belief in the strengths of this acquisition, Simpson’s Bruce W. Dienst took over the leadership of all Norican activities in the North American region as well as continuing as President & CEO of Simpson Technologies.