This may or may not be news to everyone, but it is certainly news to us. The US distributor for Aquarium Technik BURIAN has either lost their exclusive distributorship of the ATB brand, or has gone out of business altogether. We were doing our usual perusal of the aquarium forums when we happened upon a post on Reef Central by someone claiming that they were told that ATB USA had gone out of business when contacting them for service repairs. Not wanting to take that at face value, as many rumors are generated on forums that end up not being true, we went to the ATB website. To our surprise, ATB USA was not listed anywhere. Instead, the list names Tenji as the distributors for the US.
We are a bit surprised by this news, but given ATB’s seemingly diminished presence in the hobby as of late, it really shouldn’t come as one. ATB has lost significant ground in the last two years to all of the other brands that have adopted the cone shape. This isn’t to say that the quality of the ATB skimmers has declined, but hobbyists want to spend less for that quality and there are tons of other options available. We don’t exactly know when ATB USA went out of business, since nothing has been publicly announced.
Raising concern for the ATB brand itself, Tenji is its sole US distributor. Who is Tenji you ask? We didn’t know either. So, we looked them up. Apparently, Tenji is a mixed group of professionals that design and build aquariums of various shapes and sizes. They’ve got offices on both the East and West coast, and their projects all seem to be big budget. So, Tenji has some money, but do they have the connection to the hobby to move ATB skimmers within the industry?
We’ll keep an eye on the ATB situation, and hopefully we’ll see more of them in the hobby. They are great skimmers with a loyal following, and we would hate to see them vanish from our market.
