Otto Bock

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Ottobock SE & Co. KGaA

logo
legal form SE & Co. KGaA
founding 1919
Seat Duderstadt
management Hans Georg Näder , Chairman of the Board of Directors
Number of employees 7,383 (2019)
sales EUR 1,003 million (2019)
Branch Orthopedics
Website www.ottobock.com
Status: 2019

Otto Bock is a group of companies based in Duderstadt . Under the umbrella of Näder Holding GmbH & Co. KG, formerly Otto Bock Holding GmbH & Co. KG , the group is divided into two core areas: Orthopedics (Otto Bock HealthCare) and information and communication technology (Sycor).

Organization of the Näder Holding

Otto Bock HealthCare

American soldier Tammy Duckworth with a C-Leg on her right leg

The Otto Bock SE & Co. KGaA formerly Otto Bock HealthCare GmbH manufactures among other prosthetics and orthotics . The company is divided into the sub-areas of prosthetics , orthotics and neurostimulation and in 2014 generated sales of EUR 771.4 million with 6,309 employees worldwide. Of the more than 50 branches in Germany, in addition to the head office in Duderstadt, there are also the Göttingen , Königsee and Sinsheim locations . There is also a large location in Vienna with a focus on research and development . The Otto Bock SE & Co. KGaA is 80 percent of Näder Holding GmbH & Co. KG and 20 percent of EQT (companies) .

Otto Bock Mobility Solutions

Otto Bock SuperFour outdoor wheelchair

The Otto Bock Mobility Solutions GmbH is from the beginning of 2009, Otto Bock HealthCare emerged and manufactures manual and electric wheelchairs , rehabilitation aids for children and products based care. The German location Königsee (parent company of the group of companies) is part of this subsidiary, and production is also carried out in Salt Lake City and Tongzhou . The former development site in Sinsheim was closed on January 1, 2011 and relocated to Königsee.

Sycor Group

Sycor, with its headquarters in Göttingen, emerged in 1998 from the IT department of the Duderstadt-based Otto Bock Group and is a wholly owned subsidiary. According to its own information, it generated sales of EUR 71.7 million in 2016 with 560 employees. In addition to Göttingen, the company has numerous locations in Germany, Austria, USA, Canada, Singapore and China.

history

1919-1945

Today's Otto Bock HealthCare GmbH was founded on January 13, 1919 as Orthopädische Industrie GmbH by the entrepreneur Otto Bock in Berlin to provide prostheses and orthopedic products to the many thousands of war invalids during the First World War . In 1920 production was relocated to Königsee in Thuringia , where up to 600 people worked at times. Since the high demand could hardly be met by manual methods, Otto Bock began to manufacture prosthetic parts in series, thus laying the foundation for the orthopedic industry. New materials were used in production, so that aluminum parts were used in prosthetics as early as the 1930s. During the Second World War , the company, like many other companies, employed slave labor .

1946-1989

When the entire private assets of the family and the factory in Königsee were confiscated by the Soviet occupiers after the Second World War , the company settled in Duderstadt in southern Lower Saxony in 1946 . Plastics were first used in 1950. In 1953 Otto Bock Kunststoff Holding GmbH was founded, which today is an important partner of Otto Bock HealthCare. With the establishment of an American subsidiary in Minneapolis in 1958, the development of the international sales structure began.

1990 until today

Old logo until the end of 2011
Science Center Medical Technology on Ebertstrasse , Berlin

After reunification , in 1990 Hans Georg Näder took over the management of the family business from his father Max Näder , the son-in-law of the company's founder Otto Bock. In the same year, the company was able to repurchase the old Otto Bock site in Königsee. Today manual wheelchairs, electric wheelchairs, rehabilitation products for children and seat shell bases are produced at the former headquarters.

Otto Bock HealthCare GmbH is the world market leader in technical orthopedics / prosthetics with sales and service locations in over 50 countries. Competitors include Össur , headquartered in Reykjavík.

To mark the company's 90th anniversary, the newly built Science Center Medical Technology was inaugurated in Berlin in June 2009 . This building near Potsdamer Platz serves on the one hand as a place for the public exhibition Understand what moves us, and on the other hand as an event location for congresses and seminars. The subsidiary Otto Bock Mobility Solutions GmbH , based in Königsee, emerged from HealthCare on January 1, 2009 .

At the end of 2011, the old logo with the original Otto Bock international signature was replaced by a new one.

In July 2015 Otto Bock announced that it wanted to go public in two years at the latest. For this purpose, the legal form should be changed to an SE & Co. KGaA. Contrary to this announcement, it was decided in 2017 to postpone the IPO.

In February 2017 Otto Bock bought the myoelectric arm and hand prostheses developed under the product name BeBionic from the British medical technology company Steeper . The prostheses have been part of the Otto Bock product range since May 2017. The BeBionic parts are produced and finished at the headquarters in Vienna.

In 2017, the Swedish venture capitalist EQT (company) acquired a 20% stake in Otto Bock.

The Otto Bock Kunststoff Holding GmbH manufactured plastics in polyurethane technology (PUR) and technical gels. It was founded in 1953, had its headquarters in Duderstadt and in 2016 achieved sales of 130 million euros with 460 employees. The company was a manufacturer of preliminary products for the automotive industry in Europe and the USA . In 2017, Conzzeta acquired Kunststoff Holding and incorporated this former division into the FoamPartner Group .

literature

  • Maike Pfalz: Physics for Patients . Physik Journal 14 (2015) No. 10, pp. 25-29.

Web links

Commons : Otto Bock  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b Otto Bock sales and employee figures on the Otto Bock Group's website
  2. Definition of Vienna as a location according to own statement - accessed on September 9, 2019
  3. Sycor sales and employee figures on the Sycor GmbH website
  4. Our locations - Sycor. Retrieved August 2, 2017 .
  5. a b Internet page for the company's 90th anniversary ( memento of the original from January 24, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / 90jahre.ottobock.de
  6. a b Jonas Viering: Away from compassion . In: Die Zeit , No. 12/2009
  7. Company history of the prosthesis manufacturer Otto Bock With wooden legs to Berlin. In: Der Tagesspiegel. September 1, 2013, accessed July 28, 2016 .
  8. Florian Langenscheidt , Bernd Venohr (Hrsg.): Lexicon of German world market leaders. The premier class of German companies in words and pictures . German Standards Editions, Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-86936-221-2 .
  9. Mark Spörrle : Walking on springs . In: Die Zeit , No. 5/2007.
  10. ^ Science Center Berlin. Retrieved on January 21, 2019 (German).
  11. Hanne-Dore Schumacher: Otto Bock can be read worldwide . In: Göttinger Tageblatt , September 8, 2011
  12. Agency report Reuters , accessed on 30 October 2015
  13. Ottobock postpones IPO. In: aerzteblatt.de. Retrieved January 17, 2018 .
  14. System overview arm prosthetics | Ottobock DE. Accessed June 21, 2017 (German).
  15. Otto Bock acquires bebionic from Steeper. Retrieved June 21, 2017 (English).
  16. Göttinger Tageblatt, Eichsfelder Tageblatt, Göttingen, Eichsfeld, Lower Saxony, Germany: Ottobock buys BeBionic from Steeper - Goettinger-Tageblatt.de. Retrieved June 21, 2017 .
  17. Press release from June 24, 2017
  18. Sales and employee figures from Otto Bock Kunststoff Holding, sold to Conzzeta