Business description of HELIOS-TECHNOLOGIES-INC from last 10-k form

Overview

Sun Hydraulics Corporation (“Sun,” the “Company” or “We”) was founded in 1970, in Sarasota, FL, USA, and for the past 41 years has provided global capitals goods industries with hydraulics components and systems used to transmit power and control force, speed and motion. Sun’s products typically add a fine degree of precision and safety to the machinery and equipment in which they are used.

On a component level, Sun designs and manufactures screw-in hydraulic cartridge valves, manifolds, and integrated fluid power packages and subsystems. The Company’s products provide an important control function within a hydraulic system, to control rates and direction of fluid flow and to regulate and control pressures.

Sun’s screw-in hydraulic cartridge valves use a fundamentally different design platform compared to most other competitive product offerings, which are often referred to as industry common products. The Company’s cartridge valves, from the first models in the early 1970s, were designed to be able to operate reliably at higher pressures, making them equally suitable for both industrial and mobile applications. Until recently, most other companies’ screw-in cartridge valves were only suitable for use in mobile applications. Sun’s brand has grown and become identified as a product able to withstand the rigors of industrial use, where operating cycles and pressures are higher and more frequent.

To complement the high pressure, high duty cycle nature of its cartridge valves, Sun offers the broadest array of standard manifolds of any cartridge valve manufacturer. These products, available in both aluminum and ductile iron, allow the Company’s cartridge valves to be easily and conveniently installed in machinery and equipment. Sun’s standard manifolds feature common interfaces, ports and industry standard patterns to make them applicable for use in any country.

All of Sun’s standard cartridge valves and manifolds are offered in multiple versions and size ranges. The product array features five different capacities (this represents flow rates or could conveniently be referenced as horsepower), with capacity doubling with each successive size. Each version offers a subtle variation of functionality. This allows machine designers to choose a product that is optimal to the operating conditions of the equipment they are designing. Sun is unique in the industry in approaching product development in this matrix manner, which yields a product line of extreme breadth and depth. Sun’s broad scope of product offering, coupled with the high performance characteristics of its cartridge valves, makes Sun a leader in its industry.

To fully leverage its cartridge product family, the Company routinely competes in the custom manifold and integrated package market. This activity entails designing custom manifolds which incorporate multiple standard cartridge valves to create a unique and machine specific solution for a particular customer. Because of the unique nature of Sun’s cartridge valve designs, manifolds may be designed and machined to make them significantly smaller, sometimes greater than 50% smaller, when compared to manifolds that use only industry common cartridge valves. The same design characteristics that allow manifolds to be smaller also allow them to operate more efficiently by incorporating angular drillings in the design. Integrated packages allow customers to order a single part number, reduce assembly and labor time on the factory floor, and easily locate a complete hydraulic control system anywhere on a machine.

In recent years, the Company has aggressively expanded its offering of electrically-actuated cartridge valves. Despite being a late entrant in the industry with these types of products, Sun’s design approach has allowed the Company to quickly offer a full range of electrically-actuated cartridge valves, helping to increase the competiveness of the integrated package offerings. Because hydraulics systems are increasingly taking signals from on-board electronic control systems, it is necessary for hydraulic products to be capable of digital communication.

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