HISTORICAL PROFILE

With 140 years of history in the boiler industry, the roots of the John Thompson company go back even farther to 1824. In that year William Thompson set up a business near Bilston in the north of England, to build iron boats.

In 1870 this business moved to Wolverhampton and five years later branched out into the manufacture of Lancashire boilers.

From these early beginnings the company’s product development progressed into economic-type boilers, into watertube boilers and from there into steam generators for nuclear power stations. Expansion also included other fields of engineering.

John Thompson (Wolverhampton) first came to South Africa in 1935 and through an agency agreement soon established a useful order book. Recognising the market potential the UK parent established John Thompson (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd in 1937.

The company operated as a sales and contracting organisation, purchasing equipment from Wolverhampton as well as local sources, and subcontracting the erection work.

In 1946 the parent company took full control of the South African operation, established its own offices and undertook its own installation and erection work for its watertube and firetube shell boilers.

The business continued to flourish and in 1954, in a merger with local company Albert de Jong (Pty) Ltd, the first John Thompson boiler was manufactured at its plant near Cape Town. Today this is one of the largest heavy engineering facilities in South Africa, focusing on the world-com-petitive design, manufacture, construction and maintenance of industrial boilers and their combustion equipment.

In 1960 John Thompson Africa (Pty) Ltd was established under the control of the UK parent. With the acquisition of Cochran Boilers, another long-established business, in 1969 the John Thompson-Cochran Group became Europe’s lead-ing manufacturer of shell boilers. It also started a new era of co-operation with South Africa.

The next development came in 1970 when Clarke Chapman, based on Tyneside, merged with John Thompson and created the Thompson-Cochran Boiler Division.

The mergers continued: Clarke Chapman and Reyrolle Parsons formed Northern Engineering Ltd (NEI) in 1977 and 12 years later NEI merged with Rolls-Royce to create the Rolls-Royce Industrial Power Group, which included John Thompson Africa and International Combustion Africa Ltd (ICAL).

In 1986, John Thompson Africa became the first company in Africa to be granted ASME certificates and code stamps for Power Boilers, Pressure Vessels and Pres-sure Piping and in 1992, their quality man-agement system was approved in accord-ance with ISO 9001.

With the acquisition of NEI Africa Ltd by Alstom South Africa in 2001, John Thompson Africa became a business divi-sion of Alstom Power with a new name – John Thompson Boilers.

In 2002 ALSTOM restructured its opera-tions in South Africa and John Thompson Boilers became a division of Alstom SA (Pty) Ltd.

In 2004 Alstom South Africa acquired 90% of its shares from Alstom Europe and be-came a South African owned company with a 50% BEE shareholding. At the same time John Thompson Boilers became Alstom John Thompson (Pty) Ltd. In 2008 the shareholding in Alstom South Africa was restructured when a consorti-um acquired its total equity and its legal name changed to Alstom Electrical Indus-tries (Pty) Ltd. In 2009 Alstom Electrical Industries, which previously shared its name and logo with the Alstom group, rebranded itself with a new name and corporate identity - ACTOM. John Thompson then became a division of ACTOM (Pty) Ltd. The cooperative partnership with Alstom continues with ACTOM being an Alstom technology partner. ACTOM also continues to have exclusive distribution, technology and representation rights for Southern Africa with Areva T&D and main-tains links to their business units in Europe.

HISTORICAL PROFILE

JOHN THOMPSON. A division of ACTOM (Pty) Ltd

Cape Town Head Office PO Box 129, Bellville, RSA Tel:+27(0)21 959-8400 Fax:+27(0)21 959-8545 Johannesburg Office PO Box 8382, Edenglen, RSA Tel:+27 (0)11 392-0900 Fax:+27 (0)11 392-0938 Durban Office PO Box 32292, Mobeni, RSA Tel:+27 (0)31 408-9700 Fax:+27 (0)31 408-9722

www.johnthompson.co.za e-mail:info@johnthompson.co.za