Company Overview

Founded in June 1992,  Saminco designs and manufactures solid state electric vehicle traction controllers powered by Batteries, Hybrid Electric, Fuel Cells and Power Centers. Our controllers are used in fuel cell and hybrid electric buses, automobiles, light rail vehicles and underground mining as well as high-speed brushless motor drives for light-weight compressors and high-speed spindles. We have customers in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, South America and Australia. We have factory trained and authorized service centers in North America, Europe, South Africa and Australia with negotiations presently underway in China.


The principal shareholder of Saminco Inc. is Bonne W. Posma, who has over 40 years experience with the solid state control of AC and DC motors.

Saminco employs over 50 people at our 2 locations, with service, repair and training at our Lavalette, WV facility, and our corporate headquarters in Fort Myers, Fl. The Saminco team has over 15 years experience in building traction drives and has manufactured electric traction drives for Fuel Cell Buses produced by Ballard and Georgetown University, Hybrid-Electric systems for Allison Electric Drive division of General Motors as well as over 3,500 AC/DC and DC/DC controllers for underground mining vehicles.  These include shuttle cars, continuous miners, railed vehicles and long-wall shearer haulage drives ranging in power from 5 kW to 200 kW operating from 230V AC to 575V AC or 80V DC to over 600V DC supplies.

We manufacture DC/AC converters to allow variable speed operation of standard 208V/230V or 415V/460V, 3-phase AC machines from 72V and 120V battery banks over a power range from 0.5kW through 40 kW.  We are presently developing a new1000V AC inverter. The company also specializes in DC/DC step-up converters for fuel cells and batteries rated up to 250 kW.  These typically step up DC from 240V to 320 V or from 450V to 630V.

We are the prime supplier for EATON/Cutler-Hammer for their Respondor II series of industrial overhead crane controllers.

At Saminco we have excellent in-house test facilities and 500 kVA of available power for testing traction drives up to 300 kW rating and high-speed brushless motor drives up to 100 kW at 20,000 RPM.

We have strong R & D capabilities and are presently building controllers for shunt DC motors, series DC motors, brushless motors, induction motors, fuel cell power converters, electric vehicle traction drives and spindle drives up to 60 kW and 60,000 RPM.

In our pursuit to become the leading manufacturer of electric traction drives, Saminco is continuing to expand its manufacturing capabilities, has recently doubled its factory space (to 20,000 sq. ft.), and continues to hire traction drive engineers and technicians.

July of 2001 we opened a second location in Lavalette, West Virginia, which now is our primary service and training facility for our mining controls. We have plans to expand this facility to include all mining manufacturing, leaving our Fort Myers, Florida facility as our on and off road electric vehicle, crane control and research and development headquarters. 

Our track record of successful projects arises from our policy of understanding our customers' requirements and then exceeding their expectations.