NCH eyes local retail market

MANILA, Philippines - NCH Philippines Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of US-based NCH Corp. located in Dallas, Texas has been operating quietly in the Philippines since 1968 but hardly anyone in the Philippines knows about its existence, except for industrial clients like maintenance engineers and companies involved in maintenance services.

Yet, this widely diversified group — both in products and markets — sold in 2009 (despite the global financial crunch) a total of $943 million in the US, North America, Europe, the Philippines, Asia and Latin America while most of its competitors have slid or folded up.

Its entry into the Philippines in 1968 was in owning 40 percent and being only a division of the highly-diversified Jardine Davies group(that included International Harvester, Hapag Lloyd Shipping and others), squeezing its way to the top until it finally bought 100 percent of Jardine in 1981. Its first Filipino country manager was Tristan Villareal, followed by two Americans. Currently, another Filipino, Ernie Gutierrez is at the helm until he turns it over to Rodolfo Arellano beginning May 1, 2011. May is the start of the fiscal year of the company.

Under the present leadership, the company will begin to aggressively push by July its industrial products to the local retail market and eventually become another household byword just like its would-be competitors, whose product quality is wanting.

NCH is traded in the New York Stock Exchange and has been operating as NCH Corp. The parent company in the US was founded in 1919 and NCH now operates in 52 countries, including the Philippines.

 It supplies environmentally-friendly cleaning and sanitizing products for varied applications like food safety sanitizers and insecticides for agriculture, lubricants like hydraulic oil, gear oil and special oil additives including the food-grade oils (for heavy industries), drain maintenance, water treatment for cooling and boilers, pet care, first aid and furniture care.

NCH Philippines Inc.’s manufacturing plant in Cainta uses both imported (80 percent from the US) and local (20 percent like containers, additives, oil, acids and chlorine) raw materials. The plant produces cleaners, greasers and disinfectants that are sold to varied industrial companies that have invested billions of pesos into their facilities and would want to maintain them in good condition for a longer period, using the higher-priced maintenance lines of NCH.

“We want to get into the retail market because we feel the local consumers are prepared to buy the more expensive but premium quality and environmentally-safe products that NCH carries,” Arellano told The STAR.

Arellano said that since he joined in 1986, the company had been growing at an average of 25 percent a year, rising in 2010 after storm Ondoy sank many production facilities in Metro Manila and most of these companies bought NCH lines for their equipment and plant maintenance and cleaning requirements.

When the Asian crisis struck, the company grew only at seven to 11 percent but comparing to all other companies in the region, it still managed to post a growth when others slackened or died.

Its current sales force in the five divisions of its operations in the Philippines totals 80 spread across its offices in Cebu for the Visayas, Davao for Mindanao and Tektite building in Ortigas for Luzon.

NCH creates awareness of its products to its industrial clients by holding free seminars where it demonstrates the efficacy and effectiveness of its products for specific applications.