The expectation is closing 2018 with 20% revenue increase, mostly packaging coding products and industrialized product inspection.

Soma Sul expects to close 2018 with a 20% higher revenue compared to 2017. The group, which head office is located in Chapecó (SC), is one of Brazil´s largest food inspection industrial coding and equipment market companies, and it is formed by the companies Soma Sul Equipamentos, Soma Sul RS Equipamentos, Soma Equipamentos Industriais and Datec Indústria e Comércio de Máquinas.

Soma Sul started the activities in the Santa Catarina city in 1999, when it provided exclusive novelties in industrial automation and coding field to the country. The first products marketed in Brazil were designed to packaging coding. Next, it introduced food inspection equipment in partnership with the English company Loma Systems – providing meat metal detectors and X-ray equipment, that cover every food product type.

‘The Brazilian market was not aware of the existing technologies to industrialized product quality control until Loma arrived in Brazil. And introducing this novelty made Soma Sul become an innovation reference’, explains Gilberto Inácio Dick, the company commercial manager.

Currently, Soma Sul Group has another four plants located in the cities of São Leopoldo (RS), Toledo, Curitiba and Maringá (PR) and with 75 employees, and also another international brands represented: Technomark (micro-puncturing), Cognex (barcode readers), Gardner Denver (air compressors, vacuum pumps and blowers), Festo and Mitsubishi Electric (industrial automation). More recently, it established a partnership for Graco distribution in lubrication system and special valve lines.

For 2019, the expectations are even better to Soma Sul, that relies on several niches to expand its performance. ‘The automation market tends to grow even more in the next few years, due to the increasingly higher need for real-time information. Thus, the equipment will be integrated to company software’, explains Dick, referring to Industry 4.0 concept development in Brazil.

The group is also moving to a new area in Curitiba. ‘We need more space, to enable a better work area organization and match our load and unload area to our good transport growth’, explains Gustavo Müller Martins, the company CEO. The company SomaFlux will be established in this new address, focused on service and product sale to air compressors, blowers and vacuum pumps. The novelties will have applications in several fields, including food industry, hospital products, electro-electronic products, etc. ‘Our 2019 strategy is expanding our opportunity range to close our next year with a growth above 25%’, says Soma Sul´s CEO.