Piv ting into the medical device industry

Managing director of Intertronics, Peter Swanson explains the company’s history and how it pivoted from a soldering tip distributor into an adhesives supplier to the medical device sector after Med-Tech Innovation recently visited the company’s Technology Centre.

Intertronics specialises in adhesives — including materials and technology — for the medical device assembly sector. This includes bonding, coating, sealing, encapsulating, potting, masking, and gasketing products, together with the most appropriate equipment and accessories for surface preparation, mixing, application, dispensing, and curing them. The company focuses on helping customers achieve productivity, quality, profitability, and return on their investment (ROI). However, the business started out as a small supplier of soldering tips.

I was born across the Atlantic in New Jersey — my parents were both American. My father worked for a solder business called Alpha Metals, at that time a small familyowned company.

They started exporting to the UK, and in the early 1960s my father began travelling here, visiting, and supporting UK customers. Soon, he started bringing his young family with him. Over my childhood, we moved across the Atlantic seven times as a family, until we moved more permanently to London in 1970. I was grateful for a good education and was accepted to Jesus College at Cambridge University to read mathematics before switching to law. On graduating, after considering a further degree in business, I decided I was done with studying and explored the possibility of starting my own business.

At that point, the only industry I knew anything about (and then, not really very much) was electronics, as I had worked in my father’s office over some holidays. In those days, printed circuit board assembly factories often had lots of operators who were hand soldering. They were making TVs, VCRs and pagers, for example. I found a supplier of soldering iron tips that was slightly cheaper, and slightly longer lasting, than the market incumbents, and set off trying to sell them.

Intertronics grew slowly at first, but from 1982 to 2000, we started to grow consistently. We were servicing the printed circuit board assembly market with soldering, repair, and other consumable products. The UK and Ireland had many companies making high volume electronics, including large contract manufacturers like Solectron, SCI and Flextronics — and mobile telephone makers like Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson. But in the early 2000’s, there was a quite sudden market shift, as all these companies moved to locations like Eastern Europe, Mexico, and China.

With our main customers disappearing, we realised that a new strategy was needed. So, we decided to focus intently on a nascent part of our business, adhesives. We would be able to leverage our existing skills, and market ourselves in the same consultative way, but to a wider range of technologybased customers

— including the medical device assembly sector, now one of our biggest.

HOW DOES THE BUSINESS SUPPORT THE MEDICAL DEVICE MARKET TODAY?

We are one of the UK’s most respected suppliers of materials and equipment to the technology and high-performance assembly industries. We have a team of 25, serving around 3,000 customers from our base in Kidlington, Oxfordshire.

We supply a range of products from our carefully selected supplier partners, who have shared values, excellent service and technical support, and synergies with each other. Alongside this, we have a growing range of our own adhere branded products.

Every adhesive application is unique, complex, and challenging. Choosing and evaluating an adhesive involves considering every aspect of the application, from design