Sapa Extrusions Americas has identified the automotive industry as a major growth opportunity for aluminum extrusions. It has invested in technical resources and a new research facility to support automotive customers and take advantage of the increasing use of aluminum in vehicles. Sapa recently partnered with Ford to supply structural aluminum tubing for the new aluminum-intensive Ford F-150 pickup truck. Sapa's president is optimistic about the company's future and potential for growth as the automotive industry shifts more to aluminum.

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Driven
to succeedPatrick Lawlor steers Sapa
Extrusions in the right direction.

2. 36 American Metal Market May 2015 www.amm.com
D
on’t ask Patrick Lawlor to
compare the behind-the-wheel
feel of Ford Motor Co.’s svelte,
new aluminum-intensive 2015
Ford F-150 with its storied 700-pound
heavier, steel-intensive predecessor. It’s not
that he won’t. The truth is he can’t.
“I had one on the street a few weeks ago in
our plant,”said Lawlor,commenting on his en-
counter with what Ford Motor Co. has called
its toughest, smartest, most capable F-150
ever.“But I haven’t driven an old F-150.”
Fact is Lawlor, a Dublin native and self-
described “financial guy,” has spent the four-
and-a-half years since being named president
of Rosemont, Ill.-based Sapa Extrusions
Americas negotiating the hair-pin curves and
hazards that tend to surface in the wake of any
merger and/or acquisition. Lawlor knows that
road all to well.
In August 2009, Oslo, Norway-based Sapa
AS acquired substantially all the U.S. and Ca-
nadian assets of Indalex, a North American
aluminum extrusion company, in a bankrupt-
cy auction. The transaction added 10 active
plants—six in the U.S. and four in Canada—
with 29 presses and a total annual capacity
of about 315,000 tonnes to the Sapa Group
stable.
Today, Lawlor is in a decidedly different—
perhaps even enviable—position thanks in no
small part to the ground swell of interest in
and anticipated shift to aluminum from steel
on the part of the North American automo-
tive supply chain. Ford’s conversion of its best-
selling F-150 to aluminum is being billed as
just the beginning of a long and lucrative light-
weighting road trip for aluminum.
The numbers being batted around border
on the breathtaking. A June 2014 research
report issued by Troy, Mich.-based Ducker
Worldwide LLC predicted, for instance, that
aluminum sheet usage for light vehicle body
and closure parts would increase to about 4
billion pounds by 2025 from less than 200
million pounds in 2012.And aluminum extru-
sions—and Sapa— are definitely along for the
ride.
Prior to the acquisition, neither Sapa nor
Indalex participated to any measurable degree
in the automotive market.“But we recognized
two or three years ago by working with Tier
Ones and OEMs (original equipment manu-
facturers) that there was a huge opportunity
here,”Lawlor recalled recently.“And we start-
ed to invest in terms of resources, both on the
commercial and the technical side.”
The initiatives those investments have un-
derwritten range from conducting a series—
some 50 last year—of so-called Sapa acad-
emies to promote the broader understanding,
use and growth of aluminum extrusions
across various markets to establishing a new
office in Detroit.
A self-proclaimed ‘finance guy’ turned aluminum extrusions
top executive, Patrick Lawlor has spent just shy of two
decades working for the biggest names in the industry.
Over that seasoned career, the president of Sapa Extrusions
Americas has never been more bullish.Three guesses why.
Sapa
shapes up
EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW
Sapa has identified potential high-growth
market segments to increase its business.

3. May 2015 American Metal Market 37www.amm.com
EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW

4. 38 American Metal Market May 2015 www.amm.com
EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW
“Withtheopportunityweseeinautomotive,
having people face-to-face with the OEMs in
Detroit is essential,” Lawlor said, noting that
the office,which opened only months ago,will
be staffed with some commercial personnel
and a team of four or five technical people.
In another investment and measure of the
potential Sapa sees in automotive, the parent
company announced separate plans earlier this
year to open a research and development facil-
ity—no later than August—in Michigan’s au-
tomotive development district.The facility will
be based in Troy, near Detroit and the product
development teams from Chrysler, Ford and
General Motors, and is tasked with helping
support the growth of automotive aluminum
solutions. Sapa Technology Americas, as the
organization that will call the 10,000-square-
foot facility home is known, will prioritize
material research and work with products and
processes related to aluminum forming, join-
ing and alloy development.
One major return on such investments came
early this March when Sapa announced it had
formed a partnership with Ford to supply the
all-newF-150withstructuralaluminumtubing
and to provide ongoing development support
for future aluminum extrusion applications.
“We are supplying structural parts for the
vehicle,”Lawlor said.We really can’t say much
more than that.”
Sapa did acknowledge, however, that before
it began production earmarked for the F-150,
a global team of the company’s engineers and
metallurgists rigorously tested, re-tested and
analyzed the extruded aluminum. There are
no do-overs in Detroit.
“In automotive, you have to be extremely
good at what you do in lending support from
an engineering viewpoint upfront,” Lawlor
said.“Then as soon as the programs are won,
you have to be just as good in terms of execu-
tion of the project. The risk in automotive is
much higher than the vast majority of other
market segments.
“We are going into the automotive segment
with open eyes,”he added.“We are knowingly
looking at out organization and making sure
from a risk standpoint—and from a customer
interaction and execution viewpoint—that we
have an organization capable of handling au-
tomotive business in the first place.”
The order is a tall one, particularly given the
fact that today’s Sapa is what Lawlor describes
as “a very new company.” “It is still only 16
months old,”he said in early April, pointing to
a 2012 agreement between Norway’s Norsk
HydroASA and OrklaASA’s fully owned Sapa
to combine their aluminum profiles, building
systems and tubing businesses. The newly
created company, also called Sapa, is a 50-50
joint venture.
Lawlor, whose 19-year career in the alumi-
num extrusion business spans stints at Hydro
(14 years), Indalex (“a year or so”) and Sapa
(four-and-a-half years),spent the early years of
his latest assignment consolidating, restructur-
ing, and optimizing the operations base cre-
ated by Sapa’s acquisition of Indalex in 2009.
“When the companies came together the
market situation was still really bad,” Lawlor
said.“The market was down 40 percent com-
pared with 2006 and 2007 levels. So some-
thing had to be done quite quickly in terms of
that footprint.”
Something was. “At that time, I think we
had 17 locations,” Lawlor said. “We tried to
look at what business we had and how to ser-
vice the customers we did have in the most op-
timum fashion, both to support the customer
and to optimize the footprint we had in the
network. So the first year or so we were mov-
ing business around to optimize the network,
closing some plants, restructuring costs and
really trying to survive the first six to seven
months.”
Within months of the Indalex acquisition,
the market actually started to turn around.
“So the timing was good,”Lawlor said.
Besides getting a boost from reviving mar-
ket dynamics, Sapa also benefited from a stra-
tegic move away from a highly decentralized
structure that was partially a legacy of the
company’s European roots and tradition and
in part the predictable residue of a sequence of
mergers and acquisitions.
“Sapa is really a story of the past four or
five years written around mergers and acqui-
sitions,” Lawlor said. “Historically, Sapa was
formed by combining probably 14 or 15 dif-
ferent extrusion companies.”
One of the major changes introduced by
Lawlor early in his tenure as president of
Sapa Extrusions Americas was the creation
of a unified (centralized) network of produc-
tion facilities flexible enough to serve regional
customers across the country or, in various
combinations, to meet the demands of large
national accounts.
“Telling plants that had been decentralized
for years and had their own say that they are
now part of a system and network was a big
change,” he said. “Organizing as one compa-
ny, not as 26 individual plants, is a key to our
success.”
“When we talk to our customers we say you
are not dealing with an individual plant or lo-
cation, you are dealing with a sophisticated
network,” Lawlor added. “Do you want all
our offerings or do you just want a tiny piece?
Do you only really want to deal with an indi-
vidual plant or individual sales person or do
you want to deal with the whole system we
have?”
Sapa Extrusions created a unified network of production facilities to improve its flexibility.
Sapa plans to open a research and
development facility for new technologies.

5. May 2015 American Metal Market 39www.amm.com
EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW
Equally important and at roughly the same
time, Sapa went on the prowl for potential
high-growth market segments in which it
didn’t already have a strong market share.
“We started to look at automotive and com-
mercial building and construction, which
were two segments that neither Indalex nor
Sapa played in a lot, back in 2010 and 2011,”
Lawlor said. “Obviously, automotive wasn’t
doing that much then. It’s only in the past 24
months or so that automotive opportunities
have exploded.”
Powered by government-mandated mile-
age standards, that explosion of interest in the
lightweighting talents of aluminum sheet and
extrusions has detonated a series of educa-
tional and informational exchange initiatives
on the part of Sapa.
“We see a huge interest level from the OEMs
today in terms of the use of aluminum,” Law-
lor said.“But their education level, having not
used aluminum—either sheet, much sheet or
extrusions—before is quite low. This is why
we are pouring resources into our Detroit of-
fice, to enable us to educate customers regard-
ing what potential there is for the use of extru-
sions on a vehicle as we go forward.”
Sapa is also investing heavily in application
and alloy development.“We’ve really built up
what we call the North American Technical
Center,which started in Portland,Ore.in 2009
and has grown today to five or six locations,”
Lawlor said. “We have a total of 28 applica-
tion engineers, who are not dealing with the
everyday stuff—the buying and selling—but
really trying to understand the nature of our
customers’ business from an engineering and
product development standpoint.”
Sapa Extrusions Americas has not been shy
about building on the deep expertise of its par-
ent companies. “Sapa is 50 years old. Hydro
is 50 years old in Europe, of course, and has
tremendous knowledge in terms of applica-
tion and alloy development,” Lawlor said.
“We have taken that knowledge in the last
two years, hired our own people locally, sent
them to Europe and brought some Europeans
over. We have built up our knowledge and
competence base. Now all those 28 applica-
tion engineers and metallurgists are very much
aligned to the customer base to understand the
nature of what they do today and what they
could do tomorrow.”
Organized along key market segments Sapa
Extrusions Americas serves—automotive, dis-
tribution, building and construction, commer-
cial transportation to name a few—the largest
team among the group is dedicated to the au-
tomotive sector.And for good reason.“We see
automotive as a major growth opportunity,”
Lawlor said.“Still, it is coming from a base of
almost zero.”
Gauging the actual dimension of that
growth can be tricky given the long lead times
in automotive.“Because we have won certain
programs already, we are seeing major growth
for Sapa,at least,from 2015,2016 and 2017,”
he said. “But the platforms for 2017, 2018,
2019 and 2020 are being shaped today, so we
are not really certain of the true potential.”
Lawlor is certain of one thing, however.
“Right now, the extrusion industry is doing
quite well. The markets are strong,” he said.
“And if automotive really goes the way Ford
has gone, the industry will definitely have to
invest. If other vehicles and OEMs switch,
there is going to be a tremendous increase in
demand for sheet, which has happened al-
ready, and for extrusions. That will be quite
an interesting challenge from a capacity
viewpoint.”
To answer that challenge, Sapa Extrusions
Americas is redeploying assets made available
as a result of restructuring in Europe and the
U.S.“We are taking two extrusion presses and
putting them into two plants in the Midwest,
one in our Elkhart, Ind. plant and one in our
Yankton, S.D. plant,” Lawlor said.“The press
for Elkhart is coming from a French plant.
And we’ve taken a press from a Miami facility,
which we shut down a year ago, and put that
into Yankton.”He expects both units to be on-
stream in the July/August timeframe.
And he is more bullish than ever on the
future. “I’ve worked in the industry for 18
years in many locations in Europe and North
America and looking forward, it is the most
optimistic time I can think of in my career,”he
said. “Over the past four years, we’ve spent a
lot of time integrating companies. The result
is a very professional network of plants that
is operating extremely well from a safety and
service standpoint and (is) able to transfer
business within that network seamlessly.
“We have a great model and one that is very
difficult for anybody out there to replicate,”
he added.“And we have a solid foundation of
excellence in terms of our market approach,
how we deal with customers, our operational
background.”
With support from that experience and
Sapa Extrusions North America, Lawlor and
his management team are looking forward to
where they want to take the company in the
next five years. The targets—rapidly growing
markets like automotive or market segments
like building and construction in which the
company doesn’t have a major share—are
set.” And that obviously leads to investment
decisions,” Lawlor said. “It’s making us look
at capacity. It’s making us look at innovation,
technology, alloys and spending. With the op-
portunity we see and the potential growth, we
are standing back and trying to understand
what the implications are for Sapa Extrusions
Americas and how we can help influence mar-
ket dynamics and growth over the coming
three or four years for the industry.
“The table is set,” Lawlor said. “Now we
just have to start eating.”
JO ISENBERG-O’LOUGHLIN
The new Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center used Sapa Extrusions products.