57th General Assembly

October 16th to October 19th 2016

Toulouse, France

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Members can download presentations here.

The Tantalum-Niobium International Study Center held its Fifty-seventh General Assembly in Toulouse, France, from Sunday October 16th to Wednesday October 19th, 2016. Over 200 delegates attended the General Assembly. Toulouse is the centre of the European aerospace industry and a pole of excellence for the medical, IT and space industries. It is the fourth largest city in France, located in the Southwest region, and is also called the ‘pink city’ due to the colour of the traditional local building material.

Highlights of the event included:

• The technical programme of presentations from the world's leading experts in tantalum and niobium.
  
• The Welcome Reception on Sunday evening, generously sponsored by Alex Stewart International.
  
• The Gala Dinner, to be held at the Aeroscopia Museum of Aviation, generously sponsored by Exotech, Inc. and A&R Merchants Inc.
  
• A factory floor tour of the Airbus facility, followed by lunch at Château St Louis in Labastide-St-Pierre, a family-run winery. The tour and lunch have been generously sponsored by Metalysis Ltd. 
  

General Assembly report and documents:

The General Assembly was held on the morning of October 17th. During the General Assembly an Extraordinary General Meeting took place, at which members voted to accept the proposed new Charter. Other motions passed during the General Assembly included the replacement of the 2009 ASM Policy with an ASM Code of Conduct, the adoption of an antitrust policy, minutes from the 56th General Assembly and the budgets for two financial years (July to December 2006 and January to December 2017).

Nine companies were elected as new corporate members of the association and three organisations joined as associate members. During the last year two companies transferred corporate membership and nine did not renew corporate membership. This brought the total membership of the association at the end of the General Assembly to 98.  Full details will be provided in Bulletin 168 (publication date January 2017), under ‘Member company news’.

Mr William Millman and Mr Dale Gwinnutt did not stand for re-election to the Executive Committee. The other ten members of the Executive Committee had confirmed their wish to stand for re-election.  Five new candidates had also come forward.  As the number of candidates for the Executive Committee exceeded the twelve positions allowed for by the T.I.C.'s Charter, a secret ballot was held.  The member delegates approved the following twelve people to form their Executive Committee: Mr Conor Broughton, Mr John Crawley, Mr David Gussack, Mr David Henderson, Mr Marc Hüppeler, Mr Jiang Bin, Ms Kokoro Katayama, Mr Raveentiran Krishnan, Mr David O'Brock, Ms Candida Owens, Dr Daniel Persico and Mr Alexey Tsorayev.  Of these twelve, Mr David Henderson was re-elected as President of the T.I.C. for the coming year. 

The full technical programme, including abstracts, was published in our quarterly Bulletin 166.