KASTO Officially Opens New Headquarters

KASTO News

	Chairman of the Aluminium Stockholders Association officially opens KASTO's new HQ in Milton Keynes.
Mrs Lee Shaw, Chairman of the Aluminium Stockholders Association, cutting a ceremonial ribbon on 11th November to officially open KASTO's new HQ in Milton Keynes. Armin Stolzer is pictured centre with Ernst Wagner on the right.

To celebrate its move from Milton Keynes to new headquarters in Milton Keynes, the UK subsidiary of German sawing and storage equipment manufacturer, KASTO, held a two-day open house on 11th and 12th November 2009.

Mrs Lee Shaw, Chairman of the Aluminium Stockholders Association, officially marked the opening of the HQ on the 11 November, and Mr Bryan Holden, Director General of the National Steel Stockholders Association on the 12th November, by cutting a ceremonial ribbon. Armin Stolzer, chairman, joint managing director and owner of the KASTO Group, flew in from Germany to join UK managing director, Ernst Wagner, especially for the event.

A view of KASTO's new showroom and demonstration facility in Milton Keynes.

The new premises in Garamonde Drive, Wymbush, Milton Keynes, comprises offices, a showroom with demonstration facilities and warehousing for key spares.

Ernst Wagner said that the new building is similar in size to the previous premises but is much closer to the company's main customer base, which is to a large degree is located north of the M4 motorway. Many of its aerospace customers as well as KASTO users in the offshore, automotive and construction sectors are also to be found dotted around from south to north and a more central location is thus advantageous.

"Some customers will benefit from shorter distances travelled by our service engineers, who are based around the Milton Keynes area," he added.

High-performance sawing machines were on display under power, from top-end carbide band saws and circular saws to workshop models for moderate to occasional use. Circular saws from Italian principal, FOM Industrie, also featured.

The KASTO Unitower C3.0 at the company's Milton Keynes HQ is both a demonstration storage tower and a system for managing the UK subsidiary's spares and consumables.

Representative of the company's vast range of CNC vertical storage systems for raw material, both long stock and sheet, was a five metre high Unitower C3.0 storage tower for sheet metal and other flat material, including pallets.

Linked into the company's business systems via SAP, the tower manages 7,000 spares and consumables for the company and doubles as a demonstration facility. With its own integral crane picking from the storage locations, it is intended for efficient storage of raw material, remnants and semi-finished products within a small footprint on a factory floor.

Armin Stolzer's views on EMO 2009 and the business climate in general

Speaking about the EMO machine tool exhibition that took place in Milan during October, Armin Stolzer said that KASTO had exhibited without any high expectations, due to the current difficult economic conditions. As expected, the number of visitors was down compared with EMO 2007, but the high quality of visitors showing interest in KASTO products was encouraging. Many had budgets in place for 2010 or concrete investment plans and some prospects were close to making final purchasing decisions.

As in the past, no contracts were actually concluded at the show. However, due to the quality of the enquiries and impending investment decisions, there is a good chance that orders will be received in the near future as a direct result of contacts made.

Commented Mr Stolzer, "Unlike the last EMO in Milan, which was basically a domestic exhibition with limited foreign participation, we welcomed onto our stand almost as many visitors from other European countries and worldwide as we did Italian visitors, which we found very encouraging."

In Milan, the focus in sawing technologies was on advancements in high-efficiency sawing machines, especially the considerable improvements in cutting performance when using bandsawing machines and circular saws equipped with carbide blades. KASTO showed two products in the KASTOtec series equipped with the KPC (KASTO-Performance-Cutting) package. Throughout the exhibition, the company was able to demonstrate high cutting performance, typically 400 cm², when bandsawing 530 mm diameter 42CrMo4 bar, as well as good blade life.

Strong interest was shown not only in high power cutting with KPC-enabled KASTOtec bandsaws, but also in fast circular sawing for automotive applications and in storage technology.

Concerning the business cycle within the machine tool industry, the sawing sector has seen considerable order contraction over the past 12 months, which has now stabilised at a relatively low level.

It would be overly optimistic to talk of an imminent recovery from the recession; it is certainly not supported by any data that KASTO has seen. The VDMA (alliance of German machine manufacturing institutes) forecasts that the manufacturing level of 2008, which was a good year, will not be reached again until 2013.

There are, however, indicators from the Treasury in the UK and the CBI that Germany and other continental European countries are likely to grow by 1.5 per cent in 2010, compared with a 0.6 - 1 per cent growth in the UK. Furthermore, as the automotive manufacturers have destocked over the last year, car production is already starting to ramp up, with BMW even working over the coming Christmas period.

KASTO predicts that current positive trends observed in renewable energies and in the aluminium sector will translate into significant new business when the recovery starts in earnest.