news-record.com

GREENSBORO — Mack Trucks: builder of mighty trucks, a bulldog’s best friend.

You couldn’t escape the bulldog pins, bulldog shirts, a camo bulldog on an Army truck, a big bulldog balloon and a real swaggering, snorting bulldog on a stage at the company’s celebration Thursday for its new world headquarters.

The drooling dog, who answers to Roscoe, was “Mack,” the company’s living symbol for a day. He walked with CEO Dennis Slagle to the podium to commemorate the company’s move from Allentown, Pa., to Greensboro over the past several months.

The move brings 150 executive jobs and a corporate name that is synonymous with big, tough trucks worldwide.

Owned by Sweden’s Volvo Group, Mack is the sister company to Volvo Trucks, which has its North American operations on the same campus at National Service Road.

Mack hopes to save millions by sharing support systems and other management needs here.

But it wasn’t an easy transition. Employees were reluctant to leave their longtime home in Pennsylvania.

And the move came just as the world went into a deep recession and sales fell at breathtaking speed, testing the entire company’s bulldog strength.

“The industry is less than one-third what it was three years ago,” Slagle said in his office overlooking Interstate 40. “It’s been obviously a crushing blow.”

The total North American heavy-duty truck market in 2006, for example, was unusually strong because companies were buying trucks in advance of stricter EPA regulations on engines. Sales that year were in the neighborhood of 350,000 trucks, said John Walsh, the company’s director of media relations.

“We’re currently anticipating that the North American market this year is going to be somewhere in the 110,000-130,000 truck range,” Walsh said.

A move, a reorganization and a recession have proven challenging for Mack. But Slagle, who has been running the company since April 2008, believes the recession also cast a harsh light on everything the company may have been doing wrong.

“It helped us drain the swamp,” he said.

Mack’s trucks now conform with the most advanced environmental regulations that will go into effect in 2010, so the company has its products ready when companies start buying.

Slagle believes the stimulus package will help revive Mack soon. Stimulus money for roads and buildings will provide a good market for Mack.

“Mack is heavily associated with construction,” he said. “Hopefully, with the stimulus, we should be well positioned to come back strong.”

Recognizing that longtime residents of Pennsylvania were finding it tough to relocate to North Carolina, U.S. Rep. Howard Coble, a Greensboro Republican, predicted they’d come to love this city.

At the ceremony, he said he remembered the glum employees of Lorillard when they moved from New York to Greensboro years ago.

He told them that while they may have been dragged here kicking and screaming, “five months from now if you’re told you’ll have to go back to New York, you’ll go back kicking and screaming.”
 

Contact Richard M. Barron at 373-7371 or richard.barron@news-record.com