The Brand - Saluc

Hainaut-based Saluc dominates the market for billiard balls. As the World Snooker Championship reaches a climax in England, the company’s COO tells us about success, consolidation and globalisation

Cautiousness and secrecy: two words that spring to mind after visiting Saluc. Visitors to its premises hidden away in Hainaut province enter to find a deserted hallway furnished with cabinet displays, a locked door and telephone with a sign saying “Call for reception”. When he arrives, the company’s affable chief operating officer, Yves Bilquin, offers a warm welcome. “The factory is over there, but no one is allowed in there – not even our clients,” he adds, smiling but firm. It’s not surprising that Saluc plays its cards close to its chest. From its base in the Walloon village of Callenelle, near Tournai, just kilometres from the French border, it has grown to supply approximately 80 percent of the globe’s billiard balls, whether for snooker, pool or carambole, a variant of the game peculiar to that region. This makes Callenelle, with its population of 350, the world capital for billiard balls.

Saluc was founded back in 1923, and supplied chemical products to the large number of local tanneries in business at the time. It was in the 1950s, when the local industry disappeared, that Saluc made the switch to billiard balls. “It’s not clear why they decided on that and there’s no documentation,” says Bilquin, a Belgian who was previously responsible for US operations after joining Saluc from Solvay in 1992. “We were outsiders then and had to fight against German and British companies that were established on the market.”

Over the years, the precision, durability and accuracy of Saluc’s Aramith-branded balls, which are made from phenolic resin, snookered its European rivals one by one. “No, it wasn’t a question of patents,” says Bilquin, pointing out that a former rival also used to make phenolic balls. “Otherwise, our intellectual property would all be out in the public domain by now. Rather, there’s a lot of complex savoir-faire involved in making the balls. It’s the way we transform the phenolic resin that counts and we make our own machines to do this.”

These internal processes have allowed Saluc to keep rivals at bay: the new competitors first emerged in the 1980s from Taiwan and later moved to China to slash their production costs. Aramith is at present the only manufacturer of phenolic resin balls; the production process for each ball takes 23 days and they are prized for being far more resistant than the polyester balls sold by Saluc’s competitors. This is key, says Saluc, as the pressure on billiard balls can be intense: balls accelerate to speeds of more than 30kph in a matter of seconds, generating temperatures of over 250c on the carpet. As a result, polyester balls quickly lose their shape and shine and increase the wear on the table’s carpet.

“No other balls can achieve the same consistency and precision as Aramith,” says Chris Henry, the Bruges-based designer of the high-tech Acuerate cue and coach to the legendary Stephen Hendry and Belgium’s own rising star, Luca Brecel. “A professional player will notice a difference in weight immediately. It can be only a few grams, but if you strike the ball off-centre then you notice, especially with the cue ball. Aramith came up with the ‘one-gram promise’: that no ball would be more than one gram different in weight to another. I can’t think of any other company that can do this.” Other endorsements are not hard to come by. Indeed, Aramith balls are the tournament balls for this year’s Betfair World Championship in Sheffield, England – where 17-year-old Brecel was the youngest ever qualifier, though he lost in the first round to Scotland’s Stephen Maguire – just as they are in virtually every professional tournament. All of which would suggest that Saluc has good reason to be secretive.

Slowly but surely, Saluc has built on its strong opening break. The company first branched out into the production of balls for industrial purposes under the brand Preciball. “We used our know-how to make a range of spherical balls, whether in-house or outsourced,” says Bilquin. “At the EU level we are now the market leader for industrial balls and are making good progress worldwide.”

One successful example of where Saluc has done this is the track ball, which is a pointing device used instead of a mouse in certain contexts – such as for radars, aviation or surgery – due to its greater accuracy and the fact it doesn’t need to drag around. “Our experience helped with the laser-reading of the ball’s surface,” says Bilquin. “There are some production synergies with the billiard balls. It’s not the same material, but the same technology is used to make them round.” Preciball markets industrial balls made from steel, chrome, carbon, plastic, glass and so on.

After moving into the relatively dry market of industrial balls, Saluc has recently propelled itself into the glamorous world of interior design with its Fusion concept. Its main product, the Fusion Table, resolves a number of design hitches that have prevented domestic billiards tables in the past from being used for anything else. By all appearances a sleek dining table, the Fusion Table opens up into a full-sized billiards table. A number of design tricks allow these two functions to co-exist: a reinforced structure provides for legroom under the table, an adjustable height means that the table can be raised for billiards and elastic pockets snap out of sight when emptied of balls. A special lamp and chairs have been designed to accompany the table. “We were able to design and make part of it in our factory, since we have always had our own design studio to make the machines we use for the billiards,” says Bilquin. “We are still fighting to get into the [design] salons, but we have eighty sales points in the US and the EU. It’s the start of a new adventure.”

The emerging economies should provide plenty of other adventures for Saluc. Henry marvels at the recent growth of billiards under the management of the game’s majority rights holder, Barry Herne. “He’s doing a great job of it,” exclaims Henry. “There are now 40 million registered players in China and 200 million people tuned in to watch the world championship. Brazil alone has over a quarter of a million billiard tables.” Yet Bilquin doesn’t quite seem to share Henry’s enthusiasm. He describes the international situation as stable and explains that demand in the US has collapsed with the crisis. While he recognises that Asian demand “has increased and is growing”, India doesn’t at present seem too interested in billiards. “Billiards is universal,” says Bilquin, “but we’re not best placed to import the game into foreign cultures.”

But as always, globalisation gives rise to opportunities as well as challenges. “Our products are counterfeited and we constantly need to be vigilant,” says Bilquin. “Sometimes it’s just our box which is copied, at other times they try and pass polyester balls off as Aramith ones. For the moment it remains localised, mainly in Asia, and they haven’t been able to export on a large scale.” This also explains why Saluc is so careful when it comes to its intellectual property: where it’s impossible to compete with China on production costs, savoir-faire becomes all important.

Mild-mannered Saluc certainly doesn’t have a reputation for throwing its weight around. The majority of its employees come from the local area and its HQ sits abreast a canal in tiny Callenelle. This global billiard ball hub has a church, a couple of bars and 350 residents. “I’ve known them for 30 years and Saluc has always made all efforts to ensure there are no problems, whether with their employees or the environment,” says Daniel Westrade, the mayor of the commune of Peruwelz, which includes Callenelle. “They’re certainly our most visible company, as they export so much to places as far away as Japan and the US. But no one can visit the factory as it’s secret, which is one of the reasons for their success.” Indeed, although locals in the Salon de la Place fondly remember the heyday of pool, when people would queue up to play and watch, and proudly recall the feats of the great Belgian carambole players, they don’t seem to know very much about Saluc after almost 90 years of co-existence.

But then no one really knows what the founding family’s ties to the area were in the first place. They sold out in the 1980s and Saluc was passed around until it ended up in the hands of the Armand Group, a Chicago-based merchant bank that holds Revell, the German plastic model company, and used to hold a portfolio of billiards companies. The Armand Group’s partners sit on the Saluc board. Do they intervene much, I ask Bilquin. “No, not so long as we keep making money.

IN FIGURES

1923

Founded

€25 MILLION

Revenue for Saluc’s Belgian operations

98 PERCENT

Exports

90

Countries present in

185

Employees

800

Types of balls made

SEVERAL MILLION

Balls made each year

Photo: Rising Belgian snooker star Luca Brecel