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(Photo courtesy of Pfisterer)
The German-based Pfisterer Group expects Rochester to play a significant role in its global expansion.
Last week, the company cut the ribbon on its first official manufacturing site in North America—at Rochester Technology Park.
The 100,000-square-foot facility is expected to bring up to 50 new jobs to the region as the company expands the plant’s operations in four planned phases. The first phase includes an investment of around $10 million, says Johannes Linden, a member of Pfisterer’s board of directors.
Pfisterer manufactures accessories for electrical cables, especially the types of high-voltage cables that are integral to the electrical grid. This includes cable insulators and connectors that plug cables into other grid components, like breaker boxes or transformers.
In this early phase, the new facility will produce segments of Pfisterer’s product offerings that are best-selling in the U.S., says Marcus Horn, president of Pfisterer North America Inc.
“There’s lots of good things here,” Horn said of Rochester at the site’s ribbon-cutting. “First of all, great workforce, and thanks to all the local folks that have joined our team. There’s great infrastructure around here. You’ve got technical universities, RIT. You’ve got community colleges that do CNC training.”
“It’s a nice place to be,” he added.
The project is receiving up to $700,000 in public support from Empire State Development’s Excelsior Jobs Tax Credit Program, which comes with job-creation and investment requirements. The site’s first order is assembling dropper cables for Empire Wind, the state’s offshore wind project off New York City’s coast, which plans to continue using components from the site moving forward.
“This facility embodies the ingenuity, sustainability and opportunity that define this region’s future,” said JW Cook, the Finger Lakes regional representative for Gov. Kathy Hochul, at the ceremony.
Founded in 1921 and based near Stuttgart, Pfisterer has had a small toehold in New York since its 2015 acquisition of LAPP Insulators, which included a manufacturing facility in LeRoy. It has about 1,200 employees companywide.
When management started scouting sites for an official Pfisterer facility, they turned to the South, where wisdom says rents are cheap. However, Horn says those southern sites were set up for distribution and would have required the company to tear up and reinforce the flooring at great cost.
Eventually, Pfisterer started looking in the backyard of the LeRoy plant and found the infrastructure in Rochester was better suited for its needs. The firm could relocate the staff from the LeRoy facility and tap into Rochester’s workforce, which officials say is bolstered by local technical schooling.
Pfisterer checked out about half a dozen locations before Greater Rochester Enterprise directed it to the Tech Park site, Horn says.
The expansion into North America comes as part of the company’s “Strategy 2030,” which includes strengthening its positioning in the U.S., Saudi Arabia, India and elsewhere in anticipation of double-digit growth rates in all of its core regions worldwide.
The U.S. market has become Pfisterer’s largest, Horn says. He attributes that to a number of factors, including local utilities’ growing interest in making the grid more resilient to natural disasters, growth in renewables, and the expansion of data centers—particularly for artificial intelligence applications.
“A fivefold increase between now and 2030 is what we’re anticipating in terms of the volume coming out of the factory,” Horn says. “And, you know, if you were to walk through the factory right now, you would see that there’s significant portions of it that are still sitting empty.
“That’s not because we’re stupid or we just love paying rent for no reason,” he adds. “It’s because we actually have plans to fill that space as the market develops and as our skill to serve that market locally develops.”
As the company expands globally, Horn says, it anticipates expanding local connections. Pfisterer wants to work with local community colleges to set up an apprenticeship pipeline for CNC operators and aims to become more involved philanthropically.
“We want to be active in the community; we want to be an attractive, visible employer in the community,” Horn says. “We want to engage with the local Chamber of Commerce, some of the local charities. We’re not just here to benefit. We’re also here to give back.”
Justin O’Connor is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. See “Leave a Reply” below to discuss on this post. Comments of a general nature may be submitted to the Letters page by emailing [email protected].
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