Laser manufacturer Trumpf’s sales rose by 15 per cent to €3.6 billion in the 2017/2018 fiscal year. Orders received by the group rose to €3.8 billion, an increase of around 13 per cent.
These figures compare to the €3.1 billion in sales and €3.4 billion in orders achieved by the group throughout the previous fiscal year.
Germany was the biggest single market for Trumpf, with sales of over €700 million, followed by the USA and China - each with sales of around €450 million. Sales to European customers were also encouraging.
Trumpf attributes a significant portion of this year's growth to the expansion of its EUV business, where CO2 lasers are being increasingly used to develop EUV lithography systems for customers such as ASML in the Netherlands, which use them to expose chip surfaces in the production of high-speed microchips.
‘In many markets, we exceeded our targets, with all our products contributing,' commented Trumpf CEO Nicola Leibinger-Kammüller. 'We registered gratifying growth in the future technology of additive manufacturing - that is, in industrial 3D printing - and in the laser business for microchip manufacturers.'
'Even so, we are monitoring the global economy's development very closely,' she continued. 'There are increasing signs that this long phase of recovery could soon be over. We want to be prepared for that.’
In the past fiscal year, Trumpf continued to invest in digital connectivity and began optimising sheet metal machining processes towards the goal of fully automated production.
A large share of the group's investments went to the structural expansion of locations in and outside of Germany. A new manufacturing building with clean rooms and office space was erected at its headquarters in Ditzingen, Germany to expand its high-tech production capabilities, particularly for lasers used in EUV lithography for microchips. In addition Trumpf invested in manufacturing buildings at its Teningen and Schramberg locations in Germany, and also set up its largest production site to date in Yangzhou, China.
The number of employees across the group rose more than 10 per cent in the 2017/2018 fiscal year to around 13,500. There were 6,700 people employed in Germany as of June 30, 2018, with nearly 3,900 working at the Ditzingen headquarters.
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