Thibaut, the French stone machinery company, split with its UK representative of the past 30 years, The Waters Group, at the start of this year. Since then, Stephane Couteaud from Thibaut has spent a lot of his time in England and says he had met his sales targets for the year by the end of June.
Thibaut has an email address for the UK (ukinfo@thibaut.fr) and intends to have a British telephone number shortly, although for now Stephane is on 0033 6271 98184. The company exhibited both at the Natural Stone Show at ExCeL in April and the NAMM Tradex memorial masonry exhibition in Warwickshire Exhibition Centre in June.
It also had an open day at its factory in France and exhibited at Stone+tec in Nuremberg. At its open day it previewed cordless suction cups for CNC workcentres and a new edge polisher primarily for making memorials. It officially launched them to Europe in Nuremberg and will launch them to the World at Marmomacc.
The edge polisher is the T658, which is intended to help Western memorial producers get back into contention with Far Eastern imports. It can polish all four sides of a stone in one operation, even when one of the sides is an ogee top or a bullnose on a 350mm thick slab.
Stephane says the level of interest in the edge polisher has been even higher than expected on the mainland and six of them have already been sold in three western European countries, including France… but not the UK.
The UK market for memorials is small compared with most European countries, both in the number of units sold and the size and intricacy of the stones. It is unlikely that any time soon the bereaved will make a major shift away from black granite, which can be imported as semi-finished memorials from India and China at a fraction of the price of making them in the UK. Nevertheless, some of the memorial wholesalers have liked the idea of the T658.
Of more interest to most of the UK market will be the Octopod cordless suction cups, which can be used on Thibaut’s T812, 818 and 858s, or pretty much any other CNC workcentre from any manufacturer. In reality, they might not be used on many 858s because the machines tend to be used in the production of memorials (on the European mainland), which requires a stronger suction than the cordless cups can deliver. NSS reported on Octopods when they were officially launched in Germany. You can read the review at bit.ly/cordless-cups.
Stephane admits the cordless cups have met with a certain cynicism among stone processors and for now, at least, they are being sold as an option rather than as standard, although the first machine equipped with them has now been sold to a customer in France and is due to be installed after Marmomacc.
Thibaut is making a big splash at Marmomacc this time. It has taken a 400m2 stand – that’s 40% more space than it had last time. The machines on it will include the big five axes T858, the new T658 edge polisher, an 812, but also a T108, of which there are hundreds in UK stonemasonry workshops. The point, says Stephane, is to emphasis that although Thibaut has moved a long way along the technological route, it still produces the simple, straight forward machines that so many stone companies find essential.