Marlborough, MA January 22, 2002 - For the second straight year EKRA America was awarded the service excellence award at the APEX trade show in San Diego, CA. Cosponsored by Circuits Assembly magazine and Technology Forecasters, Inc., the Service Excellence Awards program is the only awards program that honors companies in the electronics assembly equipment industry that excel in the critical area of customer service. The ratings that the award was based on came from actual customer feedback obtained by Technology Forecasters through a phone interview process. Each customer contacted was asked to rate EKRA in the service categories of dependability, ease of use, responsiveness, technology, and value for the price.

"We have built our company around ensuring that customers are truly happy with working with us. The Service Excellence Award is a particularly important program for us because it provides a direct measurement as to how we are doing against this goal. It is also very rewarding to have won the award for the second year in a row." Says Steven Hall, General Manager of EKRA America.