Made in America: Inside Faymonville’s $100m US Expansion

Alexander, I know your own background is engineering and production-led.

Then I believe you spent six years as CEO of Cometo before taking over as CEO of the Whole Famoville Group in 2024.

Tell us what you found when you inherited the job and what your initial priorities were.

Let us get back to 2017, maybe that is when I started in the company.

I started in the company because I was convinced by Alain Femoville himself who knew already at that time for approximately 10 to 15 years out of my former professional life and we were all the time joking that one day we would work together and in 2017 he gave me a call to tell me about the Cometo project in Italy and he said, oh now it's time we need to talk and we met and then we flew down to Italy, we had a look to the company and yes, we started by having a clear mission which was make Cometo great again.

People were not sitting at the right position, were not feeling well, were not able to take any decisions so My first job there was clearly to make sure that everybody would sit in the right position, would get motivated again, that we get the right investments from our ownership and that we started through with a real presence on the market and with a strong background from the Veymobil Group.

My engineering and technical background is in my former professional life.

Since I'm working here in the Faymoville Group, my target was much more on general management, but focused all the time on the, let me say, sales-directed domains at the end.

Okay.

And there are various brands within the group.

Tell us where each one sits and what the proposition is to the customer.

Up

to 2017, when we started the adventure with Cometo, Feymovil was clearly a supplier of tracted trailers, no propelled trailers.

It's not 100% correct what I'm saying, Fremobil tried to establish some propelled vehicles, but if you do not have long-term deep knowledge about this kind of products, it's very difficult to be able to enter in the market.

So the strategy at that time was clearly to be able to buy this know-how somewhere and the opportunity was at Cometo at that time.

Why did Femovil try or did this step ahead? The answer is very clear to become a full range supplier for heavy haulage market.

Not only on road but also off road.

and then when we go to the on-road we clearly have two brands which is MAX trailer and FEMOVIL MAX trailer is easily explainable it is the really highly standardized and modular vehicle with a certain range of options clearly limited and FEMOVIL is the range which is going in higher payload and you have the possibility to customize the trailer with highly standardized sub-assemblies Now, when we go to the off-road business, we have Cometo there since 2017 and Cometo is also, let me say, a full range supplier from standard to very special vehicles.

Why Morello at the end? Morello at the end was a highly compatible product with the downsizing in the payload.

As Cometo stops at 60 tons of payload, Morello starts at 60 tons payload down.

And Morello has the know-how of fully electrical propelled vehicles.

So we bought there an additional know-how to complete our full range portfolio.

Now if we take Anne and Lisa and Hannah inside this loop, seventh generation.

It would be at that time the third generation who is dealing with trailer.

So it is an historical business that Framoville started to build tractor trailers at the end.