Felix Böttcher
| Felix Böttcher GmbH & Co. KG
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|---|---|
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| legal form | GmbH & Co. KG |
| founding | 1725 |
| Seat | Cologne, Germany |
| management | Franz-Georg Heggemann |
| Number of employees | 2,000 (Böttcher Group 2018) |
| sales | 243 million euros (2018) |
| Branch | Printing, packaging, industry |
| Website | www.boettcher-systems.com |
The Felix Böttcher GmbH & Co. KG , an owner-run family company headquartered in Cologne on the Rhine is the world market leader for coating rotationally symmetrical body (market share 40%). Around 60% of all printing machines built worldwide are delivered with roller coatings from Böttcher. The company is considered a hidden champion , employs over 2,000 people, 650 of them in Germany, and generates a turnover of 243 million euros (2018) with over 70% abroad.
history
Felix Böttcher is run as a family business in the eighth generation and goes back to the master tanner Johannes Jacobus Loosen (1702–1775), who opened his own business in Cologne in 1725. According to the Family Business Foundation , Felix Böttcher GmbH & Co. KG is one of the 30 oldest family businesses in Germany. From 1825 the company also devoted itself to glue boiling . First contacts to the printing industry were made in 1891, when Otto Loosen (in the fourth generation) first produced gelatine for printing rollers. The namesake of today's group of companies, Felix Böttcher, had already started manufacturing roller mass in Leipzig in 1878 . However, he died early and in 1892 Ernst Herrmann bought the company from the widow. Just one year later, the new owner switched the company to the production of finished rolls. This innovation (up until then the printing companies had coated their rollers themselves with the gelatine they supplied) quickly caught on and by the turn of the century the company, with branches in Munich and Berlin, had become an important partner to the printing industry. At the same time, Wilhelm Loosen had come under tough competitive pressure in Cologne and so in 1910 he accepted the cooperation offer from the Leipzig roller manufacturer Ernst Herrmann from Felix Böttcher. Both founded a GmbH, in which they each had a 50 percent stake, and already laid down a clear division of labor in the articles of association: Leipzig supplied the roller compound, Cologne produced the finished gelatine rollers. The company grew - also through the takeover of smaller competitors - and in 1922 employed 28 people in Cologne alone.
An important milestone was the switch from gelatine, which is sensitive to temperature and moisture and is highly susceptible to wear, to the synthetic rubber Buna in 1933. But the upward trend was stopped by the war: While Felix Böttcher was able to deliver 42,000 rollers in 1941, it was only 20,000 in 1943. And the raw material Buna , classified as essential to the war effort , was becoming increasingly scarce. The Cologne factory was completely destroyed by bombing raids in April and October 1944. A year later, makeshift production began there, but with the erection of the Iron Curtain in 1949, the connection to Leipzig was broken . Cologne took over the competence and strategy leadership and from 1953 became the headquarters of the group, where from 1956 technical rollers for the steel, aluminum, plastics, textile and wood industries were also manufactured. Felix Böttcher also benefited from the so-called economic miracle : between 1950 and 1970 the number of employees rose from 160 to 766. After the printing works, the focus was now on printing machine manufacturers as customers: Exclusive contracts with Heidelberger Druckmaschinen and manroland ensured a solid economic basis. The first foreign production facilities were established in Italy and Great Britain in 1973. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Böttcher gained a foothold with its own production companies throughout Europe, America, Asia and Australia. In 2016, the first company on the African continent was opened in Tunisia .
The company has been managed since 1992 by the lawyer Franz-Georg Heggemann (born 1955), the husband of Horst W. Loosens (1930–2017) only daughter Bärbel. It was the first time that the two shareholder families Loosen and Herrmann agreed on a joint managing director who was responsible for “keeping the company as a family company”. In the course of a capital increase on January 1, 1995, Heggemann also became a partner in Felix Böttcher.
The company's archives are located in the Saxon State Archives, Leipzig State Archives, and form the holdings there.
Products
The core business of the Böttcher Group is the production of elastomer-coated, rotationally symmetrical bodies for applications in a wide variety of industries. One focus is on roller coatings and sleeves for all graphic printing processes ( web offset and sheet-fed offset , gravure and flexographic printing as well as digital printing ). The range for the printing industry is supplemented by printing blankets and printing chemicals such as washing and dampening agents, in which Böttcher is also the world market leader. In the field of food packaging printing, Böttcher has developed a product series for all printing processes under the brand name "Vita", which guarantees low-migration printing and thus prevents harmful substances from being carried over into food packaging. These products have been tested and certified for their conformity with food law by independent scientific institutes.
Technical rollers for the packaging, metal, plastics, wood, textile and paper industries contribute around 65% to roller sales. Rolls with a length of up to 8 m, a diameter of 1.85 m and a total weight of 15 t are coated. In addition, Böttcher develops and produces extremely fine rubber compounds for demanding applications in the areas of pharmaceuticals, medicine, sports and health as well as safety technology. In a specially designed production facility, Böttcher also produces handrails for escalators under the brand name TechGrip . Rollers for copiers are produced in plants in Germany and Thailand by the subsidiary KB Roller Tech, which is also part of the group and a joint venture with the Japanese company Kinyosha.
In addition to selling new products, Böttcher offers re-clothing for used rollers and a roller exchange program. Series of tests and analyzes in our own laboratories and on-site application-technical advice serve to optimize product and production processes.
Locations
At the company's headquarters in Cologne , where the world's largest roller production runs, central areas such as sales (national and international) as well as purchasing, development and accounting are located. In addition, the central mixing plant, the production of handrails for the escalator industry in Grafschaft Gelsdorf and the production of rollers and belts for office communication ( Bergheim ) are located in the immediate vicinity of Cologne . There are branches in Germany in Cologne, Walsrode , Berlin , Stuttgart and Munich as well as Leipzig (with its own roller production). Internationally, Böttcher is present in 39 countries on every continent with its own sales companies and operates 27 production sites in 19 countries and supplies 80,000 industrial customers in over 80 countries.
literature
- Klara van Eyll : Böttcher 1725 - 2000, history of a family business , Verlag Gebr. Kopp, Cologne 2000
- Florian Langenscheidt and Bernd Venohr (eds.): Lexicon of German world market leaders, Verlag Deutsche Standards, Cologne 2010
Web links
- www.boettcher-systems.com Website of Felix Böttcher GmbH & Co. KG
- Finding aid for inventory 21060 Felix Böttcher, Druckwalzen Leipzig, in the Leipzig State Archives
Individual evidence
- ↑ Florian Langenscheidt and Bernd Venohr (eds.): Lexicon of German world market leaders. Cooper. P. 108, Cologne 2010.
- ↑ Kristin Schmidt :: These are Germany's secret world market leaders. Retrieved August 2, 2019 .
- ↑ Florian Langenscheidt and Bernd Venohr (eds.): Lexicon of German world market leaders. Cooper. P. 109, Cologne 2010.
- ↑ Ranking: These are the oldest family businesses in Germany. Retrieved August 2, 2019 .
- ↑ 21060 Felix Böttcher, Druckwalzen Leipzig