Kasto approaches 170; sixth generation management team boosted; UK market detailed

Two new members of the family management team visited customers in the UK during December 2013. Stephanie and Jonathan Riegel saw the company's sawing machines and automated industrial warehouses in action in manufacturing and stockholding facilities from Yorkshire down to Birmingham and across to Cambridgeshire. They were accompanied by Ernst Wagner, managing director of Kasto's subsidiary in Milton Keynes. The couple recently joined the board of Kasto group, along with Nicole and Sönke Krebber, also sixth-generation members, and Ruth Stolzer, wife of sole managing partner Armin Stolzer, who has run the company for the past 25 years. Dieter Heyl is the director in charge of production and Valentin Meier heads design and R&D. Turnover at the German parent company remained stable at around €100 million, only slightly lower than in 2012 when one very large order for an automated warehouse was taken from the Bavarian uPVC window and door manufacturer Rehau. Business is increasing in many parts of the world, notably Australia, China, Singapore and Egypt. The number of employees is unchanged at 600, 10% of whom are apprentices, reflecting the policy of many German mittelstand manufacturing companies (medium sized, typically privately owned firms). The group's global storage system deliveries continue to be around twice the value of its sawing machines sales. In the UK, Kasto has delivered six big automated warehouses in the last decade, plus around 20 smaller storage systems. However, Mr Wagner says Britain needs to avoid falling behind other industrialised nations when it comes to automation. More than 1,400 Kasto automatic storage and retrieval systems for long stock and sheet have been sold around the world, but only a tiny fraction of these are in the UK. Another indication of the reticence of British firms to embrace automation, he offers, is the slow acceptance of robotics associated with sawing systems. There are hardly any examples in the UK at the moment, whereas in Germany, central Europe and the USA in particular, such systems are used widely for sorting cut pieces, deburring, feeding material to machine tools, and more. The company's top-end KASTOtec bandsaws are the main driver for growth on the sawing side of the business, with the message that such machines lower cost per cut as a result of their very high performance via tungsten carbide tipped saw blades. In 2013, however, the issue of minimising vibration has come to the fore, Mr Wagner says. Vibration reduces tool life and also that of the machine, lowers productivity, raises noise levels and negatively impacts accuracy and surface finish. So now when Mr Wagner is asked by potential customers why they should buy Kasto bandsaws, he points towards the many features of the company's saws that help to minimise vibration, increasing output and reducing customers' ongoing expenditure on tooling. "Obviously everyone says that they make a rigid machine, but we were able to prove the superiority of Kasto's bandsaws and vibration management recently during comparative trials carried out for a stockholder. "Using identical feeds and speeds to those on a competitor's bandsaw when cutting 305 mm diameter Inconel, we achieved 55% higher output and three times the blade life. "That was on one of our standard KASTOtec AC5 machines, designed for cutting with tungsten carbide-tipped (TCT) blades. We also make a high-performance KPC variant that incorporates two spring-loaded tensioners to guide the blade on the return side. This suppresses vibration even more, enabling an increase in production of between 15 and 30%, as well as extending blade life further. "The stockholder was so impressed with how our bandsaws are engineered that, in the end, it decided to buy one of our KPC-spec machines, having stated that it would have been impossible to buy the competitor's bandsaw at any price, due to its high noise level and relatively poor performance." On the subject of carbide cutting, he added that users in the UK are finally embracing the technology. Five years ago, firms with KASTOtecs, which are all capable of cutting with TCT blades, on average used them only 50% of the time, reverting to bimetal blades for the remainder. Today, that figure has increased to 90%, indicating a much higher level of productivity in UK firms – by a factor of up to four times. But there has been growing interest in Kasto's workshop/dealer range of machines, comprising hacksaws, circular saws and bandsaws. Aimed at jobbing shops, they are designed alongside the company's high-end sawing machines and are manufactured at the company's factory in Schalkau/Thueringen, Germany. They range from pull-down models priced at a couple of thousand pounds to automatic machines costing ten times more. During 2013, they accounted for 35% of sawing machine sales by value in the UK, up from 20% the previous year.