Alfons van Eekelen was in the boating industry virtually all his working life.  His connections with the Mercury brand stretch back nearly 30 years, firstly as sales manager at Kimman Nautic, which was the Mercury importer for the Netherlands.
 
When Marine Power Europe set up a branch in that country in 1978, Alfons became its first general manager.  During his tenure, he was awarded the Mercury Marine Summit Award for sales excellence four times and was also winner of the coveted Brunswick President’s Award for overall best sales performance across the corporation.  Earlier this year Alfons took on additional responsibilities as manager of the newly-formed Benelux branch.

His successor John Lasschuit joined Marine Power Europe in 1988 from one of the company’s sales and service dealerships.  His first post was technical service representative.  Since then, he has served in sales, service and MerCruiser field engineering roles, including that of technical service manager for northern Europe, followed by service administration manager, then senior application engineer.  John spent 18 months as sales manager for the Netherlands before taking up his present position of parts and accessories product manager at Marine Power Europe’s main base in Belgium.