Dear Valued Customer or Prospect:

Welcome to our electronic newsletter or “ezine”. This edition’s centerpiece article, “Copper: Supply/Demand and Pricing Factors” is designed to give you an overview the metal that has been affecting us all so much lately, and some insight into the supply-demand issues that have given rise to the almost 300% increase in copper since 2003. Making sense of prices for copper never before seen, is something we all are forced to do. We hope our article helps put this challenge into perspective.

A recent update of this report follows in the International Copper Study Group’s Report Findings of May 2007.

I thought I would take this opportunity to bring you up to date on some of the exciting things going on at ASK.

ASK has been growing significantly; we now employ 54 people and expect payroll count to continue to grow. This is twice the headcount we employed in 2003!

ASK continues to make significant investments in employee training. Sales Training, Toolmakers Apprentice Training and Cadcam Engineering Document Training are just a few of the areas in which we are growing our competencies.

And by the way, what is ask-power.com?  It’s the outgrowth of some work ASK has performed with the Tooling and Manufacturing Association’s Kent Gladish. Kent has helped us  develop what he calls a “commercial plan” which identifies all of the ways in which we can or do make contact with our customers, and what we want to convey to our customers and prospects. We started  by having our executive group brainstorm what we believed were our core competencies and how our customers perceived us. Our goal was to develop a sense of the ASK “brand”. It was a very interesting process whereby we boiled down all of the ideas into a succinct statement about ASK’s brand:

ASK is an American Manufacturer of power terminations for the automotive, military, and telcom markets, which is world-class price and quality competitive, while providing close, personalized service.

A lot of the content for our “Brand Mission” came from the ideas we discussed with you in our first edition, that staying “close to the customer” is one of the main values our customers appreciate when comparing us to “price-only” overseas suppliers. We aim to be world-class competitive and still make buying from us easy, personalized, and supportive of your many objectives.

We hope you enjoy this edition of “ASK the Experts”. Please share your comments and ideas with us, and let us know what you would like to see in future issues of your magazine.

We appreciate your business.

Steve Kase
ASK
skase@ask-power.com