After years of working together through a sales partnership, Jeff Williams of PRS Group and the Perez family, the owners of CAPE, have developed a new business venture to sell and serve CAPE machinery to the U.S. and Canadian markets. This new venture, CAPE North America LLC, will be owned by both PRS Group and CAPE and will launch this summer with its new manufacturing facility, showroom and training area in Duncan, South Carolina near Greenville, SC.
CAPE North America, LLC is a partnership between Mechanica CAPE, SLU of Spain and PRS Group. The new facility will manufacture the Mach series of quick changeover stringer lines in North America, fulfill parts orders, support customers with remote and onsite technical support, and serve as a technology center for operator and maintenance staff training for customers. Demonstration machines at the SC facility will also provide for prototyping, sales and informational purposes.
Marc Perez, a principal of CAPE in Spain and co-founder of CAPE North America, explained, “We needed a place in North America to do this final assembly — just like car manufacturing model. BMW brings the engine from Germany, parts from Canada, parts from Mexico, and everything is finally assembled in Spartanburg. That’s the beauty of engineering. This is the model we are developing in Duncan.”
Lower Costs, Fewer Containers, Shorter Lead Times
A key goal of the new partnership is to drive down costs and improve service for customers. The new business partnership will allow for more local sourcing that improves deliverability speeds and can reduce international transit costs and tariff concerns.
Jeff Williams, president of PRS Group and co-founder of CAPE North America, commented, “Right now a typical stringer line is four or five containers, because the machines are all put together in Spain, taken back apart into modules, packed up, and shipped over. Our goal is to get to locally sourced components so that maybe we’re down to one to three containers coming from Spain.”
Williams added, “For example, a chain conveyor, I can source all those things in South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. I can get those locally, improve the lead time, improve our cost of manufacturing, and cut down on unnecessary wasteful costs such as ocean freight.”
A Long-Term Commitment, Not a Trial
CAPE and PRS have had a successful relationship since they entered into an exclusive sales agreement in 2015. That success has created the need to establish a facility stateside which would better serve North American customers. This process was finalized in 2022, and the two entities began looking for a manufacturing site. They eventually decided on a new plant in Duncan, S.C., which is located between Spartanburg, and Greenville. It is situated near the BMW factory and South Carolina inland port. The new company will follow the process deployed by many other major companies, including BMW, that produce some key components abroad and assemble the final machines in the United States.
Perez stressed that this decision has been a long time in the making, and it represents a long-term commitment to the North American market. He stated, “This is the first time my family has done something like this — expanding our business internationally. We are really committed. We’re not making this as a trial. The trial was made a long time ago. This is a commitment the three brothers of us at CAPE have decided to make for the new generation, which is already at CAPE.”
What CAPE has been doing for a long time in Europe and worldwide is establishing partnerships with customers. Perez said, “Most of the orders we’ve received for CAPE North America through 2030 are coming from existing, happy North American customers. This is exactly the model we’ve built in Europe for more than 50 years, and we are trying to replicate it here.”
Training Before the Machine Even Arrives
High speed automated pallet nailing systems are sophisticated, and a CAPE nailer can be more complex to run than simpler equipment. That is why the training center matters: customers can put new or existing operators and maintenance technicians through the learning curve before their machine ships. Williams noted, “One of our customers from Kentucky with a machine on order is over the moon knowing that soon they’ll be able to send their staff to South Carolina to learn the machine before it even arrives. We can get customers through the learning curve before their machine shows up, and that extra level of professionalism is really what we’re hoping to achieve.”
Built for the Labor and Quality Squeeze
Pallet quality is becoming a much bigger concern for pallet users, and higher-quality pallets demand more precise manufacturing and tighter quality control. Producing them by hand takes even more labor at a time when skilled labor is harder than ever to find. Automated pallet assembly machinery answers both pressures at once. Williams noted, “Pallet users are automating their facilities with AGVs and all types of lights-out automation, and pallet quality is becoming more and more important. To make a better pallet at scale and speed while dealing with labor availability — with less skilled labor available, you need to do more with less and still put out a higher-quality pallet. This type of machinery checks all those boxes.”
This new venture represents a trend that the pallet industry has seen in recent years as various suppliers have entered into partnerships across the continents. But CAPE is a bit different too. Perez explained, “CAPE is a sole manufacturer that can do all (high-speed nailers, lumber automation, block/stringer ability), compared to other companies that need to combine different brands and technologies to try to do the same, with all the challenges it represents having different voices in such projects.”
Creating this U.S. partnership represents the next evolution for CAPE customers in North America. Perez shared, “This is not something that came overnight. It is the culmination of a promise that we made to all of our US and Canadian customers, to be close and at their side in their growth. This is something we’ve been working behind the scenes for probably 20 years — improving our equipment according to what customers requested, the advantages and disadvantages, developing new equipment and creating new prototypes for the future of the North American pallet industry.”
Williams agreed, “This is the start of a great journey.”
To find out more about CAPE North America, visit www.cape.es.
