Sergio Martínez reflected on the company’s origins and evolution, highlighting how it started in 1974 with a modest facility producing refractories and auxiliary materials for the Spanish steel industry. He also elaborated on how the company’s early struggles laid the foundation for its enduring values and strengths. He explained that facing and overcoming significant initial challenges naturally instilled within the organisation a set of solid core values—chief among them a strong will to survive, paired with a relentless drive for improvement, innovation, and competitiveness. These traits became essential as the company moved into an increasingly open and globalised marketplace.

Here is an excerpt of his interview with us.

AL Circle: Aleastur Group has been producing grain refiners and master alloys for more than 40 years. What key achievements have contributed to the company's longevity and success?

Sergio Martínez: As the matter of fact, the group began its journey in 1974 with a small plant manufacturing refractories and other auxiliary products for the Spanish steel industry. After a severe crisis in the 1980s, the company reoriented its business towards the aluminum sector, focusing on a global niche of special aluminum alloys with high technical requirements and dominated worldwide at that time by a few, highly reputed number of players.

Hence, our beginnings in the aluminium industry were marked by the inherent difficulties and limited resources during those times, but fully compensated with a lot of hard work of a very talented, committed and customer centric team with a desire to overcome those initial difficulties. 

Since then, we have been unwaveringly focused on our customers’ needs and organic growth, continuously expanding our global reach and fully committed to quality improvement and innovation. These elements are integral to our well-known reliability and the valuable service we deliver to the market.

AL Circle: Looking back, what were some of the most transformative moments in Aleastur's journey that shaped its current market position?

Sergio Martínez: Overcoming a very challenging initial phase, solid pillars and core values were naturally built within the company that combined a desire for survival with a constant drive for improvement, innovation and competitiveness to thrive in an increasingly open and globalised market.

On top of that, growth orientation has been at the core of our group's strategy, not only to enhance our capabilities and competitiveness but also to protect our strengths, making us more resilient and ensuring our sustainability. We have always viewed growth with a dual focus on opportunity and as a self-defense mechanism.

As part of our constant search for growth and business opportunities, we are indeed very proud of certain strategic industrial and shareholder alliances forged in different times of our history that ultimately gave us the chance to execute our most significant industrial and operational expansions. Perhaps a common thread in all our significant decisions has been our natural disposition to continuously step out of our business comfort zone.

 AL Circle Aleastur has undergone significant industrial expansion over the years. Could you highlight the recent expansions and their impact on your production capacity and global reach?

Sergio Martínez: During the last 10 years, we have increased significantly our production capabilities and expanded our alloys portfolio throughout the launch of new facilities both in Spain and Bahrain.

Back in 2014, we commissioned a new plant in Spain to produce specialty aluminium alloys in rod form, a greenfield project in joint-venture with our German partner Elisental, establishing a completely new business unit within the group to be run under a new subsidiary called ESALROD.

Nowadays we are very proud to see that the original and very challenging project has eventually evolved into a world-class asset within the niche market ESALROD is serving. The aluminium alloy rods produced are subject to a cold drawing process for serving ultimately very diverse ending mechanical, electrical and welding applications. We are not only able to produce all series of alloys in rod form (from 1x to 7x series and Zr-based alloys) but we also are able to deliver different rod diameters (from 9.5mm up to 32 mm), enhancing clear competitive flexibility and differentiation capabilities.

To read the full interview, click here