Allan Roy From Small Beginnings In Aluminum Business, Pyrotek Now Has A Global Reach

Three of Allan Roy’s customers recently pointed out what they considered to be a glaring omission on his business card.

“There’s no ‘U.S.A.’ on that,” they told Roy.

That probably wouldn’t have been an issue for the president of Pyrotek several years ago. But the Spokane Valley-based company has expanded its reach and now has operations in a dozen foreign countries on each continent.

Pyrotek makes products used in the process of manufacturing aluminum.

It has plants or sales offices in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, Venezuela, Russia, South Africa, China, Indonesia, Thailand and India.

Reprinting business cards to include the country in the address is just part of the territory when dealing in a global market.

In 1956, Dale Swanson and Lowell Brown founded Pyrotek Inc. in Spokane to produce high-quality filters for molten aluminum.

Roy, who has a background in metallurgical engineering and solid state physics, joined in 1968.

He had left his native home of Australia when he was 22 years old to go live in Canada.

Then Kaiser Aluminum brought Allan and his wife, Mearle, to Spokane, where he worked in a Spokane research department and the Mead plant.

Roy and Swanson own Pyrotek and its subsidiaries. The company has about 500 workers worldwide.

Pyrotek has expanded to offer other high-temperature materials technology.

Its product line includes ceramic precision and cast ceramic parts, ceramic boards, machined graphite parts, foundry products, and products for glass and steel industries.

And necessity spawns other innovative devices.

“If we find a customer with a problem,” Roy said, “we solve the problem, and then we’ve got a new product.”

Roy shares the credit for bringing an international focus to Pyrotek with Swanson.

“When we started,” Roy said, “people couldn’t believe that they would have to buy anything from Spokane, Washington.”

About 20 companies in the United States compete with Pyrotek, but, “No one else sees their mission as supplying the world to the same degree that we do,” Roy said.

And unlike other businesses that expand abroad through partnerships, Pyrotek owns its overseas operations 100 percent.

“It gives us the control,” Roy said. “We can do things the way we want to do things.”

He said that it might be more efficient to enlarge the plant here instead of having so many all over.

But keeping plants abroad “serves our customers way better - and that’s what’s important,” Roy said.

Each operation, run by a local manager, can deal with its local problems.

“It’s more expensive, it’s longer term,” he said. “But you get a lot better deal at the end of the road.”

After making about half a million in sales in a new market area, the company usually opens a 3,000-square-foot warehouse with an office.

But the company’s foreign ventures don’t necessarily follow the same business protocol as American branches.

Various value systems in each country mean that the company pays workers differently.

Being aware of cultural differences comes easily to Roy, an avid traveler.

Many Australians travel beyond their isolated country, he said. “You always looked outside.”

And each year, he makes a point of visiting each plant.

Although Pyrotek’s sales slowed down for about three years, they started to pick up again last September, Roy said.

“I can see (Pyrotek) continuing to grow,” he said.

Roy said that aluminum has been growing at about 3 percent a year.

“It tends to be growing in the more isolated parts of the world - that’s where we tend to do better.”

Although he still spends about a month out of each year in Australia, Roy has no plans to leave the Spokane area anytime soon.

“This is home,” he said. “I really like Spokane.”

That’s Spokane, Washington - U.S.A.