At the last International Plastics Fair in Düsseldorf – K 2010 – Coperion GmbH, Stuttgart/Germany, had been able to present its report on incoming orders and sales and was looking to the future with great confidence.With sales amounting to EUR 577 million, 2008 was so far the most successful year in Coperion’s corporate history. Incoming orders during the first half of 2008 were entirely as forecasted. In the second half of 2008, due to the crisis, there was a heavy drop in incoming orders that came without much warning and continued quite dramatically in the first half of 2009.
The crisis had a similarly drastic effect, however with some delay, on sales. Since the second half of 2009 incoming orders have been making a stable recovery, although the levels of 2006 and 2007 have not been quite reached as yet. For the current business year of 2010 Coperion expects the order intake to reach approx. EUR 480 million and sales approx. EUR 360 million.
Both the unique decline in business and the comparison with the performance of other German machine manufacturers show that Coperion can cope with cyclical extremes and has largely succeeded in emerging unscathed from the present global economic crisis, not in the least through its flexible structuring, its balanced product strategy and its worldwide presence.
Coperion has made the changed economic conditions and the difficult market situation an opportunity to further optimize its global organization and its business model and to forge ahead with innovations. The company, for example, will be investing almost EUR 30 million in the restructuring of its Stuttgart site and the implementation of an optimized production concept. Also under construction is a new, ultramodern development centre capable of accommodating the demands and requirements of various industries (plastics, pharmaceuticals, food).
Equipped with as many as 20 small, medium-sized and large ZSK compounding systems and the appropriate peripheral equipment, the development centre is at the service of existing and potential customers for pre-purchase trials, e.g. for the development of optimum screw configurations for new product formulations. Besides its new development centre in Stuttgart, Coperion also has testing facilities in Weingarten/Germany, Ramsey/USA and Nanjing/P.R. China. All of them offer customers a broad basis for comprehensive trials with products and processes.
One example of Coperion’s innovative capabilities is its new ZSK Mc series of co-rotating, closely intermeshing twin screw compounders. With their maximum torque increased to 18 Nm/cm³, these new compounding extruders achieve a 30 % higher throughput than their predecessors, the ZSK MEGAcompounder PLUS series. The reduced specific energy input results in an improvement in energy efficiency.
