TAM AS

Mr. Tor Arne Memtzoni
About: Mr. Tor Arne Memtzoni - Former Marketing Director

Mr. Tor Arne has worked for around 34 years as a General Manager in TAM AS. He retired from the company in 2015 and is currently working as a General Manager at Manima AS.

1. Would you start with a short history and overview of your company's operations?

TAM AS is a 32 years old Norwegian company, designing and producing high quality self-supporting hard skin sandwich panels, which are used in production making almost all kinds of shelters for the military market from small communication cabins up to more than 3 times expandable ISO 20’ shelters when closed

2. What do you see as the key issues or trends that will have an impact on the mobile military lightweight shelters in defence industry and then obviously the company?

Budgets are reduced, quantities in new communication shelters are reduced and there is more focus on life cycle cost and quality and flexibility. Small quantity, tailor-made shelters and flexibility is TAM’s specialty

3. What excites you most about the Defence Sector and what role can additional mergers and acquisitions play as you look to grow the company?

The demand and competition is hard, nevertheless we have succeeded in hard competition. At the time being we have no plans to expand. We prefer to be a small and flexible company with focus on good and reliable shelter and satisfied clients

4. Overseas market opportunities - are they significant at this point?

We have our main focus on the Scandinavian and European market. On the international market, we only work as a sub contractor to Scandinavian system suppliers.

5. What is the place of innovation in a company as large as TAM AS? Where are your key markets and where would you see your main focus in the future?

TAM has high focus in innovation. This is a must since most of our clients need specially made solutions and often use TAM as a troubleshooter.

6. TAM AS is growing fast across the globe, since its inception in the year 1981. How do you see things going forward in Asian region? What else is driving TAM AS’s growth?

I doubt we will go into new markets in near future. We have focus on existing cooperating partners in the Middle East.

7. What makes you so different from your competitors in terms of developing these products? What are your priorities for the next 12 to 24 months?

TAM has high focus on lightweight shelters for rapid deployment. All made in self supporting high quality sandwich material. We only use high quality and expensive core material to assure a trouble free shelter with a lifetime more than 20 years. As far as I know, all competitors use other core material and cheaper solutions to reduce cost. In the professional market we never reduce quality to make a cheaper product. TAM has ongoing military orders and this will be a good contribution to our production the coming next years.

8. What do you see as the single biggest challenge for the Defence Industry in 2014? What are some of the newer, exciting technologies or products that TAM AS is working on?

In general almost all of Defence Industries will have problems when market is reduced but TAM will still have focus on refining smart solutions and use our field and long life experience to solve our clients demands and making long lasting and trouble free shelters.