• • • EDITOR’S INTERVIEW • • • The evolving industry
Alan Vincent is the sales director of Foremost Electronics. He tells Simon King how the industry has changed in his almost 45 years working in it
A
lan Vincent started off with an apprenticeship at a company that made lighthouses called AGA Navigation Aids in
Brentford. There, he worked in the machine shop and the electronics workshop and learnt how to solder and load components onto printed circuit boards. Alongside some college work, he went on to
University at Brunel in Uxbridge, and left four years leater with a BSc (Hons) in electronics and electrical engineering. “I went to work for Weston Simfire, which made
laser-based simulators for battlefield training systems,” Mr Vincent said. “I had four years there on the engineering side as an R&D guy working in the defence sector, and then became a sales rep, working for Verospeed, a manufacturer of enclosures which was purchased by RS in 1990.” He then progressed down to the Verospeed
headquarters in Eastleigh, Hampshire, I a product management role, which lasted for about five years. “I then went to a company called Quiller
Electronics in Bournemouth, which was an importer with direct customers and I ran the day- to-day parts of the business, developed the OEM
customer base and built the distribution channels up; it then got bought by Deltron.” At that time, one of the distributors for Quiller
was Foremost Electronics and Mr Vincent knew Alan Cook, Foremost’s managing director, quite well and he joined the business as sales director in 2004. “I’ve been there ever since,” Mr Vincent said.
“It was a very small distribution company at the time, but we’re now a small to medium sized player. “At the time, it employed four people with a
small office and a small storage area. It was a switch specialist, largely for Danish company Mec, which has since been bought by Apem, and a few other products. Back then, 75% of the business would have been Mec switches.” Mr Vincent said the distributor has grown,
largely driven by technology. “We ended up moving into the enclosures
product category and had some good contacts in Schroff, and we’ve taken that from zero to £1 million-plus since 2012,” Mr Vincent said. “We’ve really rebuilt the business; we still do a
lot of switches, but the days of 25 or 30 switches on a panel don’t happen anymore.”
Mr Vincent said that as digitalisation has taken
over, switch programmes have fallen off quite dramatically, while the enclosure business has also changed as well. “Within both areas, there have been lots of
changes and opportunities,” Mr Vincent said. “We’ve changed the product profile quite dramatically. We moved premises in 2007, because the small warehouse wasn’t big enough.” Foremost Electronics currently operates a 10,000
square feet facility in Great Bardfield in Essex. Mr Vincent said that a lot of products go from
factories direct to customers, so the team at the distributor, don’t see them. The company took on a second unit, as a stores area, around five years ago. “We’ll travel to all parts of the world to attend
trade shows or to meet a new business partner.,” Mr Vincent said. “We really act as a multidisciplinary company now where we import where we can; and we act as a distributor with both the product knowledge and market knowledge that we and our customers have.” Foremost Electronics employs 13 people,
but there were some casualties caused by the pandemic.
14 ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING • OCTOBER 2022
electricalengineeringmagazine.co.uk
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