History

Concentric was originally founded as Iowa Export-Import in 1983 by Des Moines businessman John Ruan, a global visionary ahead of his time. In 1983 — as the Internet was in its infancy and a decade before the rise of the World Wide Web — Ruan saw the full potential for international trade and founded Iowa Export-Import to connect American companies with international markets (export) and products (import).

Initially, Iowa Export-Import did the difficult, complex work of navigating international protocols, cultural customs, and regulatory and legal requirements to connect importers with exporters. In 1986, we began to make and market our first globally sourced product, ag teeth made in South Korea for agricultural equipment and other uses. Today, Concentric is the world’s number one provider of rubber-to-metal molded teeth for handling forage, food crops, debris, stover, and other materials.

As international trade evolved and became more and more open and commonplace, the need for a company that specialized in connecting importers and exporters diminished. With many companies simply creating in-house capabilities to open international markets, Iowa Export-Import began to evolve toward becoming a global supplier of products and parts. The addition of our power transmission product line in 1990 signaled this growing emphasis.

With rubber teeth and power transmission parts on our product roster, Iowa Export-Import saw a need to supply other high-wear parts of agricultural and similar industrial equipment and started making and marketing seats in 1995. Today, we are the leading supplier of replacement seats in the categories we serve.

Continuing to look for opportunities to supply more parts of the machinery we were already helping build led to the addition of our electrical and control solutions group in 2003. Today, the primary product, linear actuators, is used in dozens of commercial and custom applications worldwide.

As our product lines expanded and evolved, so did our capabilities for creating customized products. Our company renamed itself Concentric in 2012 to signify our growing focus on integrating fully with customers to help engineer, design, and produce internationally sourced parts and products while maintaining and constantly improving our traditional product lines.