For over half a century, Elcon Precision LLC has served the Bay Area of California and beyond in making its services of brazing, metallization, coating, etching, and more available to a wide variety of end customers. That has hardly changed in the last few years, but the company’s abilities and role in the metals industry have been enhanced and expanded upon thanks to a development that kicked off in 2020.
The decade started on a hot note for Elcon with the official announcement of its purchase by global manufacturing network The Partner Companies (TPC). Although the purchase was made in 2011, the sale was not made public until 2020. Since then, Elcon has become even more involved with TPC and its more recent acquisitions, all of which have brought more capabilities that can be offered to customers. These acquisitions have included L&T Precision; Photofabrication Engineering Inc.; Pinnacle Precision; United Plastics Group; and Precision Eforming, last year.
All the capabilities from these businesses added to the TPC suite, “integrating well with what Elcon does for its clients and positioning it as a one-stop shop among metal manufacturers,” says Elcon Data Analyst Nikki Do.
Currently, TPC sports 11 specialty manufacturers including Elcon in its holdings, with a physical presence across the United States and sites around the world in locations like China, Mexico, and Wales. It has also received new funding from investors to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars from businesses like Huntington Bank, and work is still ongoing to continue raising even more capital.
Elcon itself recently completed a semi-merger with another operation in its Bay Area home. Only 10 minutes down the road, the new manufacturing site grants the team more edging capacity and other capabilities. This includes an increased capacity in its factory metal edging line and in refractory metals like tungsten and titanium, elements that are in demand by many of the sectors with which Elcon works closely and that require high-temperature operations.
In the couple of years since we last spoke, Elcon has added diffusion bonding to its services and more people to its team in terms of mulling and processing engineers. “Our value is our engineering team,” Do says. The company’s clients, which include medium-sized and start-up companies, often come to it with a tough engineering challenge in terms of manufacturing, such as creating a product from an obscure, advanced material. In these cases, its engineers have the knowledge to deliver while also being able to inform customers what can and cannot work, making the process efficient and informed.
As things are now, Elcon continues to see great demand from the aerospace and defense sectors for both of its major product lines. With its ceramic metallization and brazing services, the company can provide the sophisticated ceramics that go into missiles, fighter jets, or hyper-sonic applications. Among its specialty products are control grids for waxing wave tubes used for radar application in defense contexts; vacuum coaxial switches for radar systems which are often used with missile guidance; and radio frequency shielding used in planes and jets.
The company is also active in the medical industry—many of its parts are used in electrosurgical instruments in sports medicine as well as electron guns for medical imaging equipment and oncology treatment devices.
These two specific fields, however, are not the only areas where Elcon excels. Do tells us that some customers are in the photonics industry, for which Elcon makes parts for analytical instruments. Headway is also being made into the nuclear energy space with the company’s hermetically-sealed brazing process, used to braze ceramic and metal components together.
Finally, more growth is happening around the burgeoning field of data centers, all of which require considerable cooling for their servers. Elcon manufactures heat sinks and heat exchanger plates that can run coolant through these servers. The company also offers a considerable portfolio of services in the semiconductor industry, an area that promises to keep growing with the burgeoning reliance on—and worldwide interest in—artificial intelligence systems and the aforementioned data centers.
Undeniably, a great deal of growth is happening for Elcon around the aerospace and defense industries specifically, with many more proposals and project requests coming in following an increase in defense spending in the United States, according to Do. However, she indicates that the company is seeing some supply chain issues as certain types of materials and plating metals are currently experiencing shortages; prices have gone up on these materials, putting pressure on both Elcon and its end users. A lot of customers are also demanding faster timelines on projects, which could be influenced by the race to take advantage of funding alongside other market-based constraints.
Thankfully, TPC has been a big help in facing these challenges. “With a bigger footprint in the supply chain, we have leverage with both suppliers and each other,” Do says. This means that if a client has a prototype developed for their project or specifications but is in need of faster output and delivery, some of the work can be given to Elcon’s many sister companies to meet these kinds of goals. Having multiple sites throughout the U.S. has helped Elcon address these issues and given it further weight when negotiating with suppliers, meaning that despite any short-term difficulties, the company still sits in an advantageous position within its active markets.
Going forward into 2026, Elcon will be focusing on integrating both its overall capabilities and the TPC technology stack to provide greater efficiencies for its team, says Do. Having started as a group of companies working on different internal systems, becoming united within the TPC group will likely translate into greater efficiencies that will benefit both employees and customers. The integration also affords Elcon the opportunity to collaborate on engineering solutions within this network of companies. There is still much ongoing work when it comes to trying out new materials and processes, especially involving finding the right fit for a client’s project.
“Our company is well-funded and positioned strategically,” Do says, and is making investments toward solving its customers’ needs across various sectors. Elcon Precision continues to be recognized for its efforts within TPC and even locally, as its titanium surgical mesh product was named one of the top 16 ‘Coolest Things Made In California’ by the California Manufacturers & Technology Association. It also recently passed the ‘six million units manufactured’ mark of tungsten surgical components for one of its medical device company clients and celebrated the production of one million metallized ceramic components for a long-time end user in the aerospace field.
Clearly, this company isn’t slowing down. On its own merits, and with the help of its new parent company, Elcon Precision is poised to keep both its momentum and its growth strong throughout the rest of the decade.
