Tuesday, our group had our final company visit. On the agenda was GROB which happens to be my company for the final presentation. Going into this class, I honestly had never heard of GROB. As a family owned company in Germany, I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t know them either. GROB has been around for about 100 years and they are currently in their fourth generation of ownership. However, this is no mom and pop shop, the facility is enormous, spanning over 200,000 square meters. GROB makes machines with machines for machines. More simply put, they produce and sell machines that other companies buy to use in their production line of car parts. Interestingly, GROB uses their own machines to build their products. Everything is streamlined to maximize production as everything they do is order based. If GROB was a publicly traded company I would dump every penny I had into it. Their culture is amazing, they have strong century long relationship with big companies like GM, and they are ahead of the game in the EV industry.

Impressive does not fully define how I felt at the company tour. GROB has a plant in Ohio which I did not know. With that, they can avoid the tariffs by manufacturing North American machines in North America. This is something that gives them a competitive edge as many of their competitors are Chinese and only produce domestically in China. Additionally, many German companies like Audi for example, do not produce in America. GROB seemingly is a well oiled machine with few flaws in their production, their facilities, or their business acumen. GROB excels at market movement and they demonstrate a strong ability in picking up on industrial trends early. For example, GROB began making the switch to EV model manufacturing over 10 years ago. Meanwhile, companies like Hoerbiger still are making parts for manual ICE vehicles.