The international MAPAL Group – one of the leading manufacturers of precision tools for the machining of practically all materials – again achieved significant growth during the 2017 business year.
Consolidated group sales rose from €575 million in 2016 to €610 million in 2017.
“We are very satisfied with the result that we generated last year,” summarised Dr Jochen Kress, President of the MAPAL Group. The growth in sales has been matched by an increase in the number of employees – from 5,000 in 2016 to a total of 5,250 in 2017.
“We are naturally targeting further growth again for the coming year,” says Dr Jochen Kress. All the company’s activities are geared to continuous and sustainable growth. For this reason, MAPAL is again investing around six percent of the sales in research and development. In order to successfully meet today’s challenges, such as reductions in CO2 emissions and digital transformation, MAPAL has also adapted the company’s strategic orientation in recent years.
“We have, for example, addressed the topic of e-mobility from a very early stage,” specifies Kress. The company has transferred the competence in the machining of parts of the conventional powertrain to the parts to be machined of hybrid or electrically powered vehicles – and today offers the complete processing of the parts to be machined also for this sector, including full service support for the tools.
“We anticipate that in the long term, the machining volume in the automotive industry will decline,” states Kress. But, despite its close links to the automotive industry, MAPAL is preparing for this scenario. “In addition to our continued strong commitment to the automotive industry, we are planning to intensify our activities in the aerospace sector. Furthermore, we will be presenting comprehensive solutions for tool and mould making,” promises the president.
At the same time, MAPAL is continuing to keep digital transformation and universal networking in its sights.
“The efficient handling of data, in particular, very quickly struck us as being one of the greatest challenges of digital transformation for machining businesses. We reacted to this necessity with the open cloud platform, c-Com, for which we founded the c-Com GmbH in 2017,” explains Dr Jochen Kress.
With c-Com, MAPAL has created an innovative open cloud platform that not only networks the whole supply chain, but also addresses the challenges facing companies in the material machining sector.
“We have created a cross-sectoral, not a stand-alone solution,” emphasises Kress. But intelligent solutions are also playing an increasingly important role in the product areas of setting and measuring, dispensing and clamping technology that include the subject of digital transformation and the sustainable generation and use of data.