Gruber renews alliance with Battenfeld-Cincinnati

The agreement means Gruber will continue to offer complete turnkey window profile production systems – comprised of its tooling, calibration and downstream automation together with Battenfeld-Cincinnati’s extruders - for “project markets”.

These project markets include regions such as eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, where customers are often newcomers to the profile industry and want to buy an optimised and proven production system. The potential market is estimated to amount to around 30 systems a year.

“We can offer our customers truly individual solutions thanks to this concentrated expertise in the extrusion project business,” said Gruber Extrusion CEO Richard Füsslberger.

Greiner ToolTec group company Gruber Extrusion employs 220 people and posted sales of around €26m last year.

Battenfeld-Cincinnati and Gruber Extrusion will continue to sell independently in the more established markets such as Europe and North America, where profile producers tend to develop their own production systems from a component level.

Prior to the Battenfeld-Cincinnati merger in April this year, Cincinnati Extrusion and Battenfeld Extrusiontechnik (BEX) had quite different strategies for the profile market. Cincinnati supplied only extruders for the customer to integrate into their own production lines; BEX supplied tailor-made profile lines, which it built around its own downstream hardware and third party extrusion tooling.

Battenfeld-Cincinnati marketing director Dr Christoph Steger told European Plastics News that the newly-merged entity will aim to sell more equipment from its own production in established profile markets in the future.