CPT International 4/2019

COMPANY
team around Dr. Ioannidis was awarded
the Innovation Prize of the German
Foundry Industry – a prize for material,
process or product development for
companies or persons in the foundry
sector. “We at Frech are proud that the
German foundry industry, the leaders in
Europe, selected us for the prize. The
association represents our customers.
This is a stimulus for our entire team,”
Dr. Ioannidis assesses the award proudly.
Frech passed on the 15,000 euro
prizemoney to the BDG and the German
Foundrymen’s Association (VDG)
directly after being awarded it – to promote
young up-and-coming talent. A
small but richly symbolic step against
the sector’s impending lack of skilled
employees.
The future offers much more
And then – just at the end of our meeting
in Schorndorf – Dr. Ioannidis
majestically passes on some astonishing
information that is really forward-looking:
Frech is going to invest in the high
double-digit millions to massively
enlarge the Weiler site by 15,000 m² for
a logistics center and two assembly halls
for hot- and cold-chamber die-casting
machines. This increases the production
and commercial space to about 50,000
m². He says that they also have new
ideas, apart from the large-scale machines,
for the Plüderhausen site. In addition,
production capacity in Asia is to be
increased with a new works for several
million euros during the next two years.
The message is clear: 70 years of history
is not enough – the future offers much
more for this successful German
foundry supplier!
www.frech.com
From a small business to a global player
Frech was founded in 1949 by engineer
Oskar Frech, who initially produced
tools with his wife in their home in
Schorndorf. “It became time to expand
when one day the spindle of a processing
machine threatened to break
through the ceiling,” relates Louis
Braun, who has been working for Frech
since the mid-1970s. The company’s history
is reviewed on a wall about 50
meters long. Frech only acquired its
own company grounds in the Weiler
suburb of Schorndorf – the current
headquarters – two years after its founding.
The first works expansion took
place in 1958. At this time, about ten
employees worked for the company.
The first die-casting plant was put on
the market in the early 1960s: a
hot-chamber die-casting machine with a
clamping force of ten tonnes, for materials
such as tin, zinc and lead. In the
days when Chancellor Ludwig Erhard,
the cigar-smoking overseer of Germany’s
economic miracle, ruled the republic
the works in Weiler was expanded
for the serial assembly of hot-chamber
die-casting machines in 1963 – the starting
signal for today’s success.
Step-by-step the Schorndorf-based
engineers appropriated other business
segments: firstly, they launched a
hot-chamber die-casting machine for
magnesium in the late 1960s, then the
first cold-chamber die-casting machine.
They successfully entered the die-casting
business themselves with the acquisition
of Moneva in 1971. Frech thus got
the opportunity to test its plant technology
in practice. At about the same
time, the first automation elements
made their appearance in plant technology:
“spraying equipment, removal
devices and trimming presses came
along,” Braun recalls. In addition, the
newly founded Frech Leasing henceforth
simplified financing of the machines.
The number of employees rapidly
rose to about 110 in the mid-1970s due
to the construction of a new works in
Schorndorf-Weiler with its own tool
construction department. This is when
the internationalization – driven by
Wolfgang Frech after he took over from
his father Oskar Frech in 1965 – also
took off. A first subsidiary in France
kicked off the setting-up of a global
sales and service network that now
includes large parts of the EU and Russia,
as well as more distant markets such
as Mexico, Southeast Asia, India, China,
and the USA.
Internationalization accelerated
during the 1980s. The subsidiary in
Shanghai had been founded by the end
of the decade (and was later converted
to an efficient production site in 2015).
The Robamat subsidiary for producing
tempering units was founded during the
1990s, during which the joint venture
Spesima GmbH in Bulgaria was also initiated
for the automation of die-casting
plants. Furnace constructor Meltec joined
the Frech Group in 2000. The largest
acquisition in the company’s history took
place in 2007 with the take over of
cold-chamber rival Müller Weingarten.
The Group made a further important
purchase – the Swiss vacuum technology
company VDS – in 2013. Vacuum technology
can be used to dispel air inclusions
in castings, and thus optimize quality.
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