The world leader in the design and manufacture of industrial kilns for advanced ceramics, sanitaryware, tableware and industrial carbon products, Riedhammer is now celebrating 90 years of success. This German company joined the Sacmi Group in 2003, a milestone event in its history that has seen it achieve ten years of outstanding results and become the top firm in the global firing industry.
Sacmi has played a major role in piloting the company through the economic crisis, explain Peter Riedhammer, third-generation member of the company’s founding family and manager from 1975 to 2006, and his successor Matthias Uhl. By supporting Riedhammer’s pioneering skills, and through ground-breaking plant engineering, process and product solutions, Sacmi ensured continuation of the success enjoyed in the Eighties and Nineties when the German company was a world leader in several different sectors.
Fast firing technology, roller kilns and ferrite processing are just some of the fields in which Riedhammer has made a decisive contribution, not to mention carbon baking technology for the production of materials requiring the highest quality/technology standards (e.g. anodes, electrodes and other amorphous materials). These projects alone, explain the two company managers, have helped boost sales by 10-20 million Euros over the last three-year period.
Riedhammer became a supplier of kilns to the ceramic sanitaryware industry in the 90s, enjoying a level of success that soon made this area its main business. The company enjoys outstanding competitiveness across the entire technical ceramic sector as almost the entire production cycle remains internal and customers can count on the best technology the market has to offer. Moreover, within the context of profound worldwide change, with the transformation from a manufacturing to a consumer economy, Sacmi’s contribution has proved to be vital, allowing Riedhammer to maintain high levels of investment in design and R&D while enacting a corporate reorganisation plan in the early Nineties, begun with the ‘Riedhammer 75’ programme.
The ensuing development has been momentous, with Riedhammer now the jewel in the Sacmi Group crown also in terms of manufacturing internationalisation, with facilities in, to name but a few, China, Brazil and central Asia. In short, Riedhammer is the perfect blend of German reliability and Italian creativity, providing top-of-the-range solutions that always combine quality, attentiveness to costs, high productivity, low consumption and limited emissions.
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