Pennex Aluminium unveils $38 million expansion at Leetonia location

Pennex Aluminum Company unveiled their new $38 million expansion of their extrusion and fabrication line at their Leetonia location last week.

The facility now has two large aluminum press lines that company officials say are the most innovative of their kind in the world. The expansion was made possible through a 15 year tax abatement from Leetonia and a 45%, six-year tax credit from the state of Ohio.

Ohio Lt. Governor Mary Taylor, says, "Being able to step in with a job creation tax credit certainly is helpful when you have businesses like this looking at various opportunities to expand knowing they could have expanded in Pennsylvania. Of course we want to be able to compete and I think that was very helpful."

Pennex makes a lot of different kinds of parts for different kinds of companies but by far their biggest customer is the automotive industry. They make parts for companies like Ford, Tesla and General Motors.

Company President, Dave Riebe, says, "We produce aluminum parts that are very specialized and custom ordered and we extrude those from our aluminum logs that are made in a different facility of ours. Out the back of our press line here is where we fabricate those into highly specialized parts that go into a variety of specialized markets."

This expanded facility means 65 new jobs for the area. While some of those slots have been filled they are still actively hiring new workers.