Kuhne (company)
The Kuhne GmbH is a manufacturer of plastic processing machinery and equipment, based in Sankt Augustin . In 2007 Kuhne employed 300 people worldwide, 250 of them in Sankt Augustin. The annual turnover was 90 million euros.
history
In 1934 Heinrich Koch founded a company in a former bullet factory in Siegburg that soon specialized in mold construction. During the Second World War, government armament orders were mainly processed there.
After the factory, which had been bombed during the war, was rebuilt, the company switched its production to molded parts for agriculture. With the first extruder (screw press) for the production of profiles the entry into the then still young plastics industry succeeded. The first extruder was built in-house, after which the company specialized in the construction of complete extrusion systems. In 1949 the first polycarbonate sheet extrusion line was delivered to Degussa , later the first deep-drawing film line and in 1960 the first blown film line for polyethylene to England.
From 1956 Werner Battenfeld from Meinerzhagen gradually took over the extruder plant in Siegburg and in 1959 transferred its management to Walter Kuhne. In 1970, Walter Kuhne took over Battenfeld's extrusion division as part of a management buyout . He first founded Battenfeld-Kuhne Extruderwerk GmbH, which was then converted into Kuhne GmbH in 1974. From 1980 he ran the company together with his son Peter Kuhne.
In 1975 Walter Kuhne relocated the then Siegburg extruder plant to the industrial area of Sankt Augustin. Kuhne founded another company in Sankt Augustin, Kuhne-Anlagenbau GmbH. Both companies experienced strong growth in the years that followed. In 1998 Peter Kuhne founded an American company in Norwich (Connecticut) . Walter Kuhne died in 2006.