North American Bus Industries


North American Bus Industries, Inc. was a manufacturer of heavy-duty transit buses with its headquarters, bus manufacturing and assembly operations, located in Anniston, Alabama. Its products ranged from 31-feet to 60-feet in length, and were sold to operators throughout the United States and Puerto Rico. NABI's U.S. operations also include an aftermarket parts division in Delaware, Ohio, and an after-sales service center at Mira Loma, California.
The company was acquired by New Flyer Industries in 2013, which in 2015 discontinued production of NABI's product lines at the Anniston plant.

History

Body and Coach Building Works of Budapest, Hungary was a very large bus manufacturer having multiple plants in Hungary, with a production output during the 1980s of over 13,000 buses per year. In the 1980s, Ikarus Hungary entered strategic partnerships with U.S. and Canadian assemblers to sell its Ikarus 280 articulated bus to the United States and Canadian transit markets as the Crown-Ikarus 286 and Orion-Ikarus 286 / Orion III, respectively. Under these partnerships, partially finished rolling chassis were shipped from Hungary for local fitment of seats and drivetrains compatible with domestic transit fleets. Both partnerships were dissolved by the late 1980s.
Ikarus Hungary formed another partnership in 1989 with Union City Body Company, Inc. of Union City, Indiana to produce American variants of the Ikarus 415 and Ikarus 435 transit bus for the United States market as the 416 and 436, respectively. The partnership was incorporated as Ikarus USA, Inc., which was responsible for assembling and marketing the buses to the United States market, with operations based in Anniston, Alabama. UCBC declared bankruptcy in 1992.

American Ikarus, 1992–1996

The company that is now known as NABI was incorporated in the US, in the state of Alabama, in November 1992, under the name American Ikarus, Inc.. It was incorporated by the First Hungary Fund Limited, a Jersey equity investment fund. Its incorporation was accompanied by FHF's concurrent formation of a Hungarian holding company, North American Bus Industries, Kft. owning the shares of American Ikarus. This arrangement—with American Ikarus as a subsidiary of NABI Hungary-- resulted in FHF's investment being Hungarian-based—in alignment with FHF's objective of investing in business opportunities resulting from the political and economic changes then taking place in Hungary. American Ikarus simultaneously acquired the assets of Ikarus USA. Such assets included facilities in Alabama, miscellaneous equipment and inventory. Simultaneously with the formation of American Ikarus, the previously established strategic alliance between Ikarus USA and Ikarus Hungary was assigned to the newly incorporated American Ikarus.
At the time of incorporation, it was planned that American Ikarus would purchase unfinished buses from Ikarus Hungary under its strategic alliance, ship them to the U.S. and perform final assembly at its Alabama plant. This arrangement provided certain engineering and manufacturing benefits and allowed compliance with "Buy America" requirements of the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1982 which established American content requirements for federally assisted rolling stock procurements, including transit buses. Such vehicles had already been designed by Ikarus Hungary specifically for the U.S. market, with unfinished buses having been produced previously by Ikarus Hungary under the same strategic alliance with Ikarus USA. These vehicles were the Model 416 forty-foot standard-floor transit bus and its larger sibling, the Model 436 sixty-foot articulated transit bus.
The plant in Anniston, AL opened in 1993 under this business arrangement, performing final assembly operations, delivery and after-sales service using unfinished knock-down buses produced in Hungary. Delivery of unfinished buses was accomplished by rail shipment from Budapest to Bremerhaven, then shipment by roll-on/roll-off ocean vessels to Charleston, SC, and then by delivery on flatbed trailers to Anniston, AL.
At the time of incorporation, Ikarus' business was in decline due to political and economic changes following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Such decline continued after the group's formation, resulting in the shutdown of one of Ikarus plants in Budapest. This plant was purchased from Ikarus Hungary by NABI, Kft. which simultaneously entered a license agreement with Ikarus Hungary allowing NABI, Kft. to produce its own unfinished buses in Budapest, and deliver them to its subsidiary in Alabama for final assembly and delivery to U.S. customers. In 1994, the group began use of this manufacturing arrangement with no further involvement of Ikarus Hungary, other than its role as licensor of the Model 416 and Model 436 standard-floor transit bus designs; the license was dropped in 1996.

North American Bus Industries, 1996–2006

In 1996, the company began aggressive expansion of its aftermarket parts department which had previously supplied service parts only for its own products. This expansion was accomplished by hiring individuals previously employed within the aftermarket parts organization of the defunct Flxible Corporation, which had recently discontinued transit bus manufacturing and aftermarket parts operations in Ohio. Once hired, this group leased facilities in Ohio, and began to expand the sale of aftermarket parts to operators of competing makes of buses.
Also in 1996, American Ikarus, Inc. was renamed North American Bus Industries, Inc. due to the dissolution of its affiliation with Ikarus Hungary some years earlier, and because the company was easily and incorrectly confused with the no longer related Ikarus Hungary, which had fallen into further distress due to continued decline of its European markets.
In 1997, NABI Kft. was re-registered in Hungary from a limited liability company to NABI, Rt., a joint stock company, allowing it to raise capital via public offering. Thereafter, in August of that year, the company raised $US 27.1 million in a public offering, with its shares listed on the Budapest Stock Exchange. FHF retained approximately 56% of NABI, Rt. shares, with the remainder of the shares publicly traded.
File:CAT NABI 40LFW.jpg|thumb|First generation NABI 40-LFW for Citizens Area Transit, serving Las Vegas; note styling is similar to preceding standard-floor 416 and 436
Also in 1997, NABI Hungary was certified as conforming to the ISO 9001 quality and organizational standard, with NABI, Inc. becoming ISO 9001 certified the following year. In 1998, The Group also implemented the use of BaaN, an integrated enterprise resource planning system. Additionally, 1998 marked the first delivery of NABI's new, 40-foot low-floor Model 40-LFW transit bus.. NABI announced it had won the first contract for the 40-LFW in January 1997, awarded by the cities of Phoenix and Tempe, both in Arizona.
NABI debuted the CompoBus at the City Transport Exhibit 99 in Toronto, Ontario, on May 25, 1999. The CompoBus used a one-piece composite body made from fiberglass and plastic resin, built for NABI by TPI Composites, Inc. in Warren, Rhode Island. NABI previously had announced its partnership with TPI in 1998, adding that three composite-bodied products would be developed: 30-foot and 40-foot low-floor transit buses, and a 45-foot motor coach. The first CompoBus orders were placed by transit agencies serving Santa Monica, California and Phoenix in November 1999, and 100 CompoBus models had been delivered five years later, by November 2004.
In 2000, The Group announced its move into the European bus market with NABI, Inc.'s debt-financed acquisition of all of the shares of the Optare Group, of Leeds, U.K. for $US 28.5 million, making Optare a NABI, Inc. subsidiary. Anticipated benefits included immediate participation in the European market as well as eventual European market participation with a new, composite-structured bus then under development. Plans also included the derivation of certain left-hand-drive Optare products for U.S. and Hungarian markets.
Although NABI had previously expanded its Anniston facility in 1999 and 2000, 2001 marked additional and substantial factory expansion, taking the Anniston plant from . 2001 also marked derivation of the 30-foot NABI Model 30-LFN which was a left-hand-drive derivative of the recently developed Optare "Solo" being sold in the UK. Sale of these small low-floor buses commenced to private and public operators within the U.S. An additional outgrowth of the Optare acquisition was the sale of a small number of full-size NABI Model 700SE's the following year in Hungary. These were derived from the Optare Excel, and were produced on Scania chassis.
File:LACMTA 7992.jpg|thumb|left|LA Metro NABI 40C-LFW "CompoBus"; styling is nearly identical to 40-LFW
In 2002, NABI Hungary completed construction of a new plant in Kaposvár, Hungary. This new plant was purpose-built for the manufacture of the CompoBus, a new, composite-structured low-floor bus. Production of CompoBuses began in earnest in 2003, with a significantly greater portion of this particular NABI product produced in Hungary than with other NABI products.
This new CompoBus manufacturing arrangement—unique for NABI—resulted in these buses being short of the FTA's normal Buy America requirements. However, NABI had sought Buy America waivers associated with the development of this new bus model, and had been granted two such waivers by the FTA. The first waiver allowed NABI to assemble its CompoBus outside the United States, and the second allowed it to count the composite chassis/frame as domestic for purposes of calculating the domestic component content of the vehicle. Both waivers applied to FTA funded procurements for which solicitations were issued within two years of the date of the waiver letter. That same year NABI introduced the 60-LFW, a new 60-foot low-floor articulated derivative of its 40-LFW model developed some years earlier.
In October 2004, NABI unveiled the new Model 60-BRT, which had been in development since early 2003. in response to LA Metro's request for a 60-foot low-floor articulated bus with rail-like styling for use on its new bus rapid transit route. Delivery of production versions began the following year, and a shorter, 42-foot derivative was eventually produced, making its debut at the American Public Transportation Association Bus & Paratransit Conference in May 2006.
After continuing disappointing financial results through 2004, NABI, Inc. sold its Optare subsidiary in 2005, and it also idled its composite bus production facility in Kaposvar, laying off 23% of its workforce in Hungary. The shutdown was due to uncertain future demand for the CompoBus and the weakened U.S. dollar. Also, in December 2005, the FTA refused to extend the previously granted waivers exempting the CompoBus from Buy America requirements.