Astec CEO Booth Walkthrough | World of Asphalt/AGG1 2025

Good morning everybody. I'm Jaco Van der Merwe, CEO of Astec Industries, and welcome to World of Asphalt and A1 2025. Let me show you what we have in the Astec booth. So when you walk into our booth this year, you're going to see a great combination between products and technology. The aim at Astec is to bring industry-changing solutions to the market. And the way we do that is to take the dumb iron and make it smart with the use of technology. And you will see that integrated in every piece of equipment that we have on display this year. So Astec supplies equipment from rock to road, and behind me we have our A50 jaw crusher. This is a combination of all the best features that we have on products between our Telsmith brand, JCI brand, KPI brand, and our engineers put the best of all together to reduce the cost significantly. So we're very excited to take this to the market and give our customers a great product to crush rock that we will use later in the processing and building roads. Our customers have a constant need for better information and managing of their assets. Behind me is an Astec digital display. And what we can do today is show our customers exactly where their equipment is, how they're running, fuel consumption, when they started working, and our customers that have a lot of assets can in one place see the performance of their whole fleet. This is just one example of where Astec is taking technology and combining it with our equipment. So behind me we have our RP 195 highway class paver, and we are very excited to have this on display this year. This is the paver we've always wanted. It's got all the new features that our customers are looking for, and this year we're super excited about the release of our new Easy Screed. With this product we've lightened it up, improved the quality, and the combination now between our tractor and the screed. We are definitely bringing the best paver to the market. In this display, we also have some patented technology around how our customers can improve the paving quality when it comes to seams. So our Smart X technology, it's brand new to the market, and we know that our customers are going to love this product when they start using it. So here we have the Roadtec 405 milling machine. This is a brand new product for Astec, and we are very excited about bringing this to the market. On this unit this year, we also have our camera technology on display where our customers, while they are on the unit, can see around the machine, and it's obviously designed to improve safety. So our operators are always in a danger zone walking around the machines, and this technology will help them to prevent accidents while doing the work. We have our moisture control system. We have our new remix technology where we make asphalt using a cold mix. We have our new drop zone technology right next to us. This is another fantastic feature where we take technology and put it on our equipment. It's going to help our customers to be so much safer in their daily operations. When I started in this industry, I never expected technology to bring the world of virtual reality and physical products together. What I have on right now is our virtual technology experience. And what we can do with this is we can show our customers exactly how our products are working without putting them in the danger zone of operations. So here we have an asphalt drum, and what we are showcasing here is our customer can see virtually how this drum is working, what is happening while the drum is turning. And it obviously looks very weird of me looking at something here that doesn't exist, but it is absolutely amazing. So if you have an interest to see how this technology works while it's in operation, come and visit us, put one of these goggles on, and we'll blow your mind away. So at Astec, we love to sell equipment, but more important is we love to support our customers through parts and service. This year at World of Asphalt, we have various pieces of replacement parts on display. On my left here, we have a big drum that we replace for our customers on a frequent basis. And behind us, we also have our new Versa Jet burner. When a customer invests money in buying equipment from us, they don't just buy the equipment, they buy the confidence that we will support them for the life of that equipment. Here at Astec, we take that very seriously. We know that if we support our customers with great parts and service, that they will come back and buy equipment from us. Thank you very much, and we really appreciate you listening to this introduction. Come and visit us.