Demag

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
German mechanical engineering corporation
legal form Corporation
founding 1910
resolution 1973
Seat Duisburg
Branch Mechanical engineering
Armaments
industry Steel industry

Former headquarters of Demag in Duisburg-Hochfeld
Demag AG share dated April 1937 for RM 100

Demag ( De funnel M aschinenbau- A ktien g ompany ) was a German industrial group whose sole proprietorships are scattered today. You can now find them at SMS Siemag AG ( subsidiary of SMS Holding ) , among others , but also at Siemens and a number of other companies.

Demag as an independent group

Gantry crane built by Demag in 1935 on Teilestrasse in Berlin-Tempelhof , a listed building

The Demag Group was founded in 1910 under the leadership of Wolfgang Andreas Reuter through the merger of the companies Märkische Maschinenbau-Anstalt L. Stuckenholz AG ( Wetter an der Ruhr ), Duisburger Maschinenbau AG (Duisburg) and Benrather Maschinenfabrik GmbH ( Benrath ), which was founded in 1896 . The Märkische Maschinenbau-Anstalt L. Stuckenholz AG for its part went back to the Mechanische Werkstätten Harkort & Co. in Wetter, which was founded in 1819 , a primal cell of industrialization in the Ruhr area. In 1926 the machine factory Thyssen & Co. AG (Mülheim an der Ruhr) was transferred to Demag, when the Thyssen family brought most of their group into the Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG , which, however, did not fit into a pure machine factory.

If, under the leadership of Wolfgang Andreas Reuter (called Reuter I ), the industrialization of Germany was the company's main business, the industrialization of the world increasingly became a business area of ​​the group after his son Hans Reuter ( Reuter II ) became general director in 1940. Continuously successful in the field of crane construction for decades, locomotives and rail freight wagons were soon produced . During the Second World War , from September 1942 to April 1945, with the help of forced laborers from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp , DEMAG Fahrzeugwerk GmbH in Berlin-Staaken (Albrechtshof) and Falkensee produced heavy armored vehicles (especially Bergepanther ). In the years after 1945, the heavy industrial expansion led to the construction of entire steel and smelting works.

Self-made model of a Demag R609 bulldozer, made around 1955

Under the aegis of Hans Reuters, Demag became a global company whose turnover reached the billion mark in 1961. The Reuter family, as the company's largest single shareholder, owned around 17 percent of the share capital of around 110 million Deutschmarks at the time . In the 1960s, Demag was the only company in the world that was able to manufacture and build complete steel works in its own factories with a workforce of around 28,000 employees. Demag built steel works and machine factories between Korea and South America, Narvik and Egypt. At times, up to 75 percent of sales were exported. Foresight, Reuter recognized that it was not enough to sell German products on the world market, but that it was just as important to train the specialists required to operate and maintain the systems yourself. Duisburg therefore became a training and education center for foreign steel workers, which was particularly attractive for developing countries.

In 1967, son Wolfgang Reuter ( Reuter III ) took over the management of the group as general director from Heinrich Müller, who had been appointed by the supervisory board in 1962 after his father Hans Reuter had resigned as general director and became chairman of the supervisory board. As a result, Wolfgang Reuter tried to reduce Demag's corporate handicap in relation to the financially strong foreign competition through internationalization. His group should cross national borders and become a multinational company. Reuter: "We will operate our own machine factories abroad and supply them with technical knowledge from Germany." In 1967, the Duisburg-based company had already built the largest crane factory on the black continent in South Africa.

The construction of cranes began in Wetter an der Ruhr as early as 1840 . Demag has become one of the leading companies in this area. In 1908 the world's largest floating crane (height over 40 m, lifting force approx. 150 t) was delivered to the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast , which needed it to build the passenger ships Olympic and Titanic and which was used until the 1970s. The successor model Langer Heinrich (250 t lifting force), which was built from 1913 to 1915 for the Kaiserliche Werft Wilhelmshaven , still exists today (location: Genoa). In cooperation with the Carlshütte in Waldenburg- Altwasser, a "crane shovel" was manufactured at the Duisburg site in 1907. Back then, the term excavator was reserved for scrapers with bucket chains. The actual construction of rope excavators for construction site and industrial use began in Duisburg in 1925, before the new excavator factory in Düsseldorf-Benrath began operations in 1939. The first fully hydraulic excavator was developed there in 1954 and can still be viewed on the company premises today.

Takeover by Mannesmann in 1973

Truck Crane Demag at the Leipzig Spring Fair 1976

After Demag took over the construction machinery and vehicle cranes sector, conveyor technology (indoor cranes, storage and retrieval systems, storage and order picking technology), metallurgical engineering (complete ironworks , but especially e.g. continuous casting plants ), the Compression and compressed air technology as well as plastics technology ( injection molding machines ) was technically one of the world's leading manufacturers, the company was taken over in 1973 by the Mannesmann Group based in Düsseldorf .

In 1983 Mannesmann-Demag AG and the US company Wean United Inc. from Pittsburgh founded a joint subsidiary named Mannesmann Demag Wean Co for steel mill construction.

The following restructurings were the most important of Demag within Mannesmann:

  • In 1996, a joint venture was concluded with the Japanese manufacturer Komatsu in the construction machinery sector, which finally took over the large excavator sector from the construction machinery section and renamed it Komatsu Mining .
  • The metallurgical plant and rolling technology division, based in Duisburg , went to Schloemann-Siemag (SMS) after this division incurred high losses with a US order. It is continued today under the name SMS Siemag .
  • The compressed air technology division went to CompAir in 1996, at that time part of the British Siebe / Invensys group, but now an independent company; the former Demag location in Simmern / Hunsrück still exists.

The plastics machine activities of Mannesmann-Demag were later (1999) merged within the Mannesmann Group with the plastics technology production of Krauss-Maffei (in turn acquired by Mannesmann in 1989) to form Mannesmann Demag Krauss Maffei and formed part of the Mannesmann Atecs , a holding company that included all non-telecom activities of the Mannesmann Group. The general mechanical engineering activities of Krauss-Maffei and the defense technology later went to Linke-Hofmann-Busch . This holding was later called “MPM” (Mannesmann Plastics Machinery) with the main subsidiaries Demag Plastics and Krauss-Maffei.

The tool company Strohm GmbH & Co. KG bought the name "Mannesmann DEMAG" (approx. 2009) and initially operated under the name Mannesmann Demag compressed air technology SARL & Co. KG , Stuttgart. In October 2009, the company was renamed MD compressed air technology GmbH & Co. KG . This company continues the compressed air technology division, in particular compressed air tools and motors, under the brand name "Mannesmann DEMAG".

Dissolution as part of the takeover of Mannesmann by Vodafone

From 1990 onwards, Mannesmann , who had already developed from a pure steel and tube company to a broadly active technology and mechanical engineering group, entered the field of mobile communications previously unknown to the group with the acquisition of the D2 mobile phone license. This group division grew dynamically in the following years, but provoked the takeover by the British mobile phone group Vodafone , which owned shares in D2, but with which Mannesmann entered into competition through the acquisition of the provider " Orange " in Great Britain.

After the takeover of Mannesmann by Vodafone , which took place between October 1999 and February 2000 as an economic-historical crime thriller, all of Mannesmann's industrial activities, which had shortly before been grouped as “Atecs” - “advanced technologies”, were turned into mobile communications and industrial activities strategically separated, sold to a consortium of Siemens and Bosch . This consortium then split up the individual companies, incorporated them into the new parent companies Siemens and Bosch or, like parts of Sachs , formerly Fichtel & Sachs, sold them on to ZF Friedrichshafen . The Demag divisions existing at Atecs came to Siemens. It was Demag plastic technology (with Krauss-Maffei), Demag compressor technology and Demag conveyor technology, to which the Demag mobile cranes and the crane manufacturer Gottwald belonged.

The vast majority of the former Demag subsidiaries remaining with Siemens were sold on to the American financial investor KKR in 2001 (see next section). However, the activities that remained at Siemens after that were also largely restructured and almost completely sold:

  • The truck and mobile crane division with two plants in Zweibrücken (Dinglerstrasse and Wallerscheid), which became part of the conveyor technology division (Dematic) as part of the changes in the construction machinery division, was then taken over by the American construction machinery manufacturer Terex in August 2002 . The brand name Demag was initially retained under the “Terex-Demag” brand.
  • The part of the conveyor technology division, which had already been renamed “Dematic” shortly before the sale of Atecs, namely the system and warehouse technology based in Offenbach am Main , initially remained with Siemens and was renamed Dematic with other Siemens Sub-areas (“assembling”) continued within Siemens. They initially retained the name Siemens-Dematic and were then renamed in 2005 to Siemens L & A - "logistics and assembly". Parts of the new Siemens division "L & A" were renamed back to Dematic in 2006 and sold to the financial investor Triton .
  • Other parts of the conveyor technology, namely the (non-mobile) crane technology based in Wetter (Ruhr) , were initially managed by Siemens as Demag Cranes & Components (DCC) as a GmbH. So you got back the traditional name Demag.
  • The compressor technology division last operated under the name of Demag Delaval Turbomachinery with locations in Duisburg , Hengelo and Trenton. The company produces high-performance compressors for the petrochemical, chemical and general industries and sells them worldwide. In 2001 it was integrated into the Siemens "Power" division.

Restructuring and sales by KKR

In the fall of 2001, Siemens sold the core activities of the former Demag (Demag Cranes, Gottwald and MPM) as well as a hodgepodge of other former Siemens divisions, in the Stabilus case also from Mannesmann, to the financial investor Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), who owned them in of Demag Holding S.à rl operating in Luxembourg . Siemens still held 19% of this company. By the beginning of 2008, this Demag Holding had been able to sell all essential parts of the company:

  • The automotive supplier business running under the name Stabilus (producer of gas pressure springs (gas springs for short) and hydraulic dampers), formerly part of Fichtel & Sachs (formerly Mannesmann), based in Koblenz, was sold to the financial investor Montagu in 2004.
  • The former Siemens divisions Landis & Gyr , a Swiss manufacturer of meters, which was now called "metering", and Omnetica, a British IT service provider, were also sold in 2004.
  • The restructuring of Demag crane activities ( DCC GmbH ) led to the closure of the Bad Bergzabern plant (small hoists) and a sub-plant in Wetter an der Ruhr (heavy industrial cranes, so-called "process cranes") as well as extensive staff reductions. In 2006 Demag Cranes was listed on the stock exchange as DC AG ( Demag Cranes AG ) together with the traditional harbor crane manufacturer Gottwald (formerly also mobile cranes), which was assigned to the Zweibrücken mobile crane factory during Mannesmann’s time. Since autumn 2011, DCC has belonged to the Terex Group, which had taken over the majority of the shares. At this time, Demag Cranes & Components, Gottwald and KSR (Kranservice Rheinberg) belonged to DC-AG.
  • Kunststofftechnik initially traded under the name MPM ( Mannesmann Plastics Machinery ), today as Krauss-Maffei . This holding company included the Demag Plastics Group, Krauss-Maffei Kunststofftechnik, Munich, Netstal Maschinen AG , Näfels , Switzerland, and Berstorff GmbH , Hanover. The plastics engineering activities of today's Sumitomo (SHI) Demag , which manufactures injection molding machines with its headquarters in Schwaig near Nuremberg , a small machine factory in Wiehe , production sites in Ningbo (China) and a joint venture in Chennai (India) . The location in Strongsville (Ohio, USA) was closed in 2007 and now only functions as a service location . The entire plastics technology division was sold to another financial investor, Madison Dearborn, in 2006. In 2008 the investor sold the Demag Plastics Group , which was then taken over by the Japanese Sumitomo group.
  • The Argillon division (technical ceramics, now trading under the name “Ceramics”, formerly part of Siemens) was sold to Johnson Matthey from Great Britain in December 2007 for 214 million euros .

The restructuring of Demag Holding by KKR is significant from an economic point of view, as it triggered, among other cases, the " locust debate" initiated by Franz Müntefering in 2006 .

Further successor companies

The crane production facilities that had emerged from the earlier Dingler works in Zweibrücken came into the possession of Terex after Demag was dissolved . In 2019, the Japanese crane manufacturer Tadano took over the company, which has operated as Tadano Demag GmbH since then . The cranes from Zweibrücken are again being sold under the Demag brand name .

Web links

Commons : Demag  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Horst A. Wessel (Ed.): Thyssen & Co., Mülheim ad Ruhr. The story of a family and their company. Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 3-515-05823-0 .
  2. ↑ falkensee.de - Sachsenhausen concentration camp - satellite camps Falkensee. Retrieved January 12, 2019 .
  3. ^ DEMAG board of directors: Waiting for Wolfgang . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 1962 ( online - 11 July 1962 ).
  4. ↑ Manager / DEMAG: Serve and Earn . In: Der Spiegel . No. 31 1967 ( online - 24 July 1967 ).
  5. ↑ Jens Ostrowski: Mülheimer Kran helped build the Titanic . The West , May 31, 2011, accessed March 11, 2012.
  6. ↑ Cable excavator around 1932
  7. ↑ In the mirror of history. MD Pneumatic Technology, accessed on October 16, 2017 .
  8. ^ Terex Cranes Resurrects Demag Crane Brand at bauma 2016 , at www.forconstructionpros.com , accessed April 15, 2017