# Inductotherm sells furnaces for 20-year contracts

By MarketScale Newsroom · Published 2026-10-29 · Industrial IoT on MarketScale
Canonical: https://www.marketscale.com/industries/industrial-iot/inductotherm-sells-induction-furnaces-on-a-20-year-service-promise-1276759

> Inductotherm Group China's CEO says the furnace sale is only the start of a relationship that customers expect to run twenty, thirty or forty years.

## Key points

- Inductotherm customers sign twenty-year contracts and expect furnace performance for the full term, Pearson says, so the vendor's engineers and parts stock matter as much as the machine.
- Ajax TOCCO Magnethermic and Fives publish service and training menus that cover the same ground, so any real difference between vendors sits in execution, not in the list of offerings.
- Inductotherm says on its own site it has built more than 41,000 melting and heating systems, and Rowan University counts more than 3,500 group employees in more than 20 nations behind the support promise.

Customers sit down with Jeffrey Pearson, list the twenty-year contract they hold, and ask whether the furnace will still perform in year twenty. Pearson, president and CEO of Inductotherm Group China, said in a MarketScale Studio segment recorded at an Inductotherm Group leadership conference that the company answers by pointing at its own age and its installed base. The sale, Pearson says, is only the beginning of a relationship the company expects to last decades.

The interview comes as Inductotherm passes seventy years. Rowan University's biography of founder Henry M. Rowan dates the company's start to 1954, when Rowan sold his family home for seed capital, while the university's December 2015 press release gives 1953. By that arithmetic the seventieth anniversary fell in 2023 or 2024, and Pearson now dates the company's customer-first commitment from those beginnings.

## The sale is year one of a twenty-year obligation

When a customer names a contract term, Pearson says the company can point to numerous examples that show it has already outlasted that horizon, and that it intends to be present for whatever span the customer names. The claim rests on scale as much as on history.

Rowan University counts more than 3,500 Inductotherm Group employees in more than 20 nations. The university gave that figure in its December 2015 press release on Rowan's death, and Williamson College of the Trades, in a tribute published the same month, counted 40 companies in 17 countries and said the group's systems account for a large portion of the induction melting and heating installations in use worldwide. On its own site, Inductotherm Corp. says it has built more than 41,000 melting and heating systems for metal and metalcasting producers.

For a melt shop manager, those tallies describe organizational depth rather than a contract clause. The practical question is whether the engineers who understand a furnace installed two decades ago are still inside the group today, and whether someone still makes the parts. Pearson's answer rests on headcount, geography and the fact that the company has already been through several equipment generations with the same customers.

## Engineers, seminars, parts and a standing watch on the supply chain

> We have engineers that are looking at the technology as well as the components that are needed to keep our equipment running. And we have training seminars that keep our equipment running and the customers up to date on how to do things, both digital seminars as well as in person seminars, and the service and support that we provide with the parts. — Jeffrey Pearson, President and CEO, Inductotherm Group China

Pearson names four pieces: engineers, training seminars, parts, and continuous checks on the supply chain. The engineers track the technology and the components that keep installed equipment running. The seminars come in two formats, and the parts business sits alongside a supply-chain review meant to find gaps before they idle a furnace.

On its own site, Inductotherm Group lists the in-person format through Radyne's induction training seminars, held at Radyne's own facility, with the page quoting hotel rates in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for attendees. The standard program is three days of power supply training: basics of induction, power supply orientation, load matching, troubleshooting, safety procedures and how to check for commonly failed components. Load matching is tuning the power supply's output to the electrical characteristics of the coil and the metal inside it, so that power reaches the charge instead of being wasted.

The point of the course, the site says, is that plant staff learn the diagnostic techniques and component replacement procedures to troubleshoot and do preventive maintenance themselves. Radyne also teaches custom classes at the customer's plant, built around that customer's specific equipment. A plant that trains its own technicians still needs the replaced components in stock, which is where the fourth piece comes in.

Inductotherm does not publish which components its supply-chain review flags or how much safety stock, meaning parts held in reserve against a supplier interruption, it carries against them. What Pearson does define is the metric the review serves, which is uptime. That ties the parts business to a number the plant already tracks, rather than to a catalog.

## What it takes to keep a coreless furnace alive for decades

The AFS Institute's first daily task for a coreless induction furnace is checking the refractory lining before any metal melts. The institute laid out the routine in Modern Casting in August 2023, drawing on its course Introduction to Coreless Induction Furnace Operations, and it warned that poor, improper or delayed maintenance is a major contributor to accidents involving induction equipment in foundries. Safe operation, the institute says, outranks efficiency and service life as the goal of a maintenance program.

A coreless induction furnace is an alternating current electric furnace in which a coiled conductor induces a current in the metal charge itself, with no iron core between them. According to Modern Casting, the metal sits inside a refractory lining, a ceramic shell built to keep its strength and shape at melt temperatures, wrapped by a helical coil of hollow copper tubing. The lining is either rammed in place from coarse and fine oxide grains around a form that melts out or is removed, or it is a preformed crucible of similar material or of silicon carbide or graphite.

Current in the coil creates a magnetic field, the field induces a current in the charge, and the two together heat the bath and stir it in a figure-eight pattern. Modern Casting says the stirring mixes alloys and evens out temperature. Too much of it raises gas pickup, wears the lining faster and oxidizes alloys, which is one reason the lining is a consumable rather than a fixture.

The power supply is the other long-term wear point. Modern Casting describes most modern units as frequency converters: a rectifier turns incoming alternating current to direct current, and an inverter turns it back to alternating current at a frequency the operator chooses, typically between 50 Hz and 10 kHz, at power levels from 5 kW to 16.5 MW. The switching is done by thyristors or IGBTs, semiconductor devices that turn current on and off with no moving parts, and both the power supply and the coil are water cooled.

That cooling water is its own maintenance item. Modern Casting lists three tower types: an open evaporative tower that gives a large temperature drop but exposes the water to dust and dirt, a closed dry air cooler that keeps the water clean but drops its temperature less, and an industrial cooling tower that combines the two. A hydraulic system tilts the furnace for pouring, and on some furnaces a hydraulic ram pushes the spent lining out.

Each subsystem ages on its own clock, so the twenty, thirty or forty years Pearson describes is a sequence of rebuilds rather than one long run. Ajax TOCCO Magnethermic's service page lists coil repair and reconditioning, coil installation, retrofit and upgrades of power systems, and preventive and predictive maintenance as separate offerings, and that list reads as the rebuild sequence a furnace passes through. A retrofit replaces older components in an installed system with current ones; preventive maintenance is upkeep on a schedule, and predictive maintenance is upkeep triggered by the condition the equipment reports.

Pearson's engineers who watch the components map onto that sequence: the lining is consumed and replaced, the coil is reconditioned, and the power electronics are eventually retrofitted. The components Radyne teaches plant staff to check and replace are the ones that fail first, and parts for them are what the supply-chain review has to keep available fifteen years after installation.

## Ajax TOCCO and Fives publish the same menu

Ajax TOCCO Magnethermic lists eight aftermarket services on its own site, including training, coil reconditioning and retrofits. Its page says its technicians support Ajax TOCCO equipment and other brands, and that operation and maintenance training runs either on site or at the company's own facility. The page also offers factory-authorized replacement parts and field service on demand.

Fives, in its product material, describes itself as a registered training organization, a status the page says lets a customer fold the courses into its own training budget. Fives runs three courses: an operator course at the customer's plant covering the operator terminal, signalling, faults, care, maintenance and safety instructions; a maintenance course covering the rectifier and inverter, electronics boards, the water circuit and typical faults; and an induction course for process engineers on inductor geometry, power transfer and electrical impedance. Set against Radyne's three-day power supply course, the structures are close, with Fives splitting by audience and Radyne splitting by standard or custom equipment.

That bounds Pearson's claim. Ajax TOCCO Magnethermic, Fives and Inductotherm's own Radyne all advertise technicians or engineers, training and parts on their pages, and none of the three publishes pricing, uptime guarantees or service-level terms for a long-term agreement, so a buyer cannot compare them on cost without asking each vendor for a quote. Boston Consulting Group reported in February 2025 that for most of the roughly 100 industrial machinery makers in its third services benchmark, service revenue now grows faster than new equipment sales, and that the makers it calls service champions capture 16 percentage points more spare-parts sales than peers while holding less inventory.

Pearson's answer is that the difference lives in the people and in the group's shared resources. He credits the enthusiasm of the staff, their willingness to go above and beyond for the customer, and a pool of technology and engineering shared across the group's companies that he says no competitor can offer. By BCG's measure, that claim is tested on spare-parts capture and inventory, which is exactly what the supply-chain review targets.

Two concrete differences do exist between the vendors. Fives' registered-training status lets a customer route course fees through a formal training budget, a status Inductotherm does not claim for Radyne's courses. In the other direction, neither Ajax TOCCO nor Fives advertises a remote format; both describe on-site and in-facility training only, so a plant that cannot send technicians away for three days has a digital seminar option on the Inductotherm side.

## Hank Rowan's backyard furnace and the frugality that stayed

Henry Rowan built the first Inductotherm furnace in his backyard in Ewing Township, New Jersey. Rowan University said in its December 2015 press release that he started the firm with his wife, Betty Long Rowan, with the aim of cutting foundries' cost of melting metal by using induction. The university's biography adds that he had come back from Army Air Corps flight training to finish an electrical engineering degree at MIT, and that he and partner Paul Foley funded the company by selling the family home and moving to a rented house.

Williamson College of the Trades, which received $20 million from Rowan in 2008, wrote in its December 2015 tribute that Inductotherm's reputation was built on quality, efficient products and service it called unmatched, and that Rowan held to careful spending and making do with what was on hand, habits from a Depression childhood. Pearson describes the same order of priorities as the culture's test: employees who put the customer's success ahead of their own stay, he says, and the ones who do not leave, which he calls a multiplier that has compounded over seven decades.

Outside the foundry trade, Rowan is better known for the $100 million he and Betty gave Glassboro State College on July 6, 1992, which the Rowan University press release describes as the largest gift to a public college or university in the United States at the time. The college took his name, opened the Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering to its first class in 1996, and he died on December 9, 2015, at 92. For a buyer, the relevant inheritance is narrower than the philanthropy: a founder who built a company on cheaper melting and tight spending left a firm whose executives still describe service before self as the operating rule.

## The questions Pearson's four pieces hand to a buyer

Pearson's four pieces turn into questions an operator can put to any induction vendor at the quote stage. Which engineers are assigned to the power supply generation being quoted, when do the next digital and in-person seminars run, which parts does the supply-chain review currently flag, and who will recondition the coil in year fifteen. Ajax TOCCO and Fives advertise answers to the first two; the third is the one Pearson says sets Inductotherm apart.

The signal Pearson points to is longevity itself. A company that has supported its own installed base for more than seventy years, he argues, is the one to believe when it commits to twenty, thirty or forty more, and the customer with a twenty-year contract is the one who will find out whether that commitment holds.

## Sources

- [Aftermarket Services Drive Growth and Higher Margins for Industrial Manufacturers](https://www.bcg.com/publications/2025/aftermarket-services-drive-growth-for-industrial-manufacturers) (BCG)
- [Back to Basics: Induction Furnace Daily Maintenance](https://www.moderncasting.com/articles/2023/08/08/back-basics-induction-furnace-daily-maintenance) (Modern Casting (AFS Institute))
- [Parts & Services | Induction Equipment Aftermarket Support](https://www.ajaxtocco.com/parts-services) (Ajax TOCCO Magnethermic)
- [Training in induction heating processes](https://www.fivesgroup.com/induction/services/training) (Fives Group)
- [Henry M. Rowan](https://sites.rowan.edu/henryrowan/) (Rowan University)

Tags: Inductotherm Group, aftermarket service, induction furnaces, foundry maintenance, equipment lifecycle, plant operations

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