It would be very difficult to miss the factories and headquarters of BASF, not least because they occupy a site of over seven square kilometres in the town of Ludwigshafen in central Germany. There are 2,000km of above-ground piping, 200km of rail track, 115km of roads and 2,000 buildings.
In 2002, BASF had a turnover of €32.2bn employing around 38,000 people in Ludwigshafen alone, making it the largest single-company integrated chemical production site in the world.
Founded in 1865 as Badische Anilin and Soda Fabrik, BASF made coal tar dyes. It still makes dyes, but from oil rather than coal, among a host of other products. After 1945, and eight years’ reconstruction, BASF was moving into the plastics age. Since 1965, this largely European-oriented company has been globalising, although Ludwigshafen remains the hub. Europe has a 55% share of total turnover, North America 24%, Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Middle East 16% and South America 5%.
“BASF sticks to its core competences and to its idea of integrated production networks, which is described by the German word Verbund,” said Dr Ralf Sonnberger, group vice-president of the regional business unit (RBU) Glues and Impregnating Resins Europe. “This makes BASF the leading chemical company in the world today.”
The glues and impregnating RBU comes  under the umbrella of the inorganic chemicals division and has two production units.
The first is for methane-based chemicals from natural gas which include products such as ammonia, methanol, carbon dioxide (from the ammonia process) the production of urea (using ammonia and carbon dioxide); and of melamine. The woodworking industry accounts for 75% of melamine consumption in Europe.
The second production unit is for glues and impregnating resins and formaldehyde.
Thus the whole production process follows two paths: through ammonia to urea and melamine; and through methanol to formaldehyde. Ultimately there are around 250 products made from these two paths, including urea formaldehyde (UF) and melamine urea phenol formaldehyde (MUPF) glues and UF and melamine formaldehyde (MF) impregnating resins.
“As well as ammonia, BASF also created the process for formaldehyde in the late 19^th century and developed the Kaurit line for the production of UF glues in 1931,” said Dr Sonnberger.
The company employs an ‘integrated process chain’ which involves the input of customers’ and market information, product management, sales and technical service, the laboratory and the production and supply chain, into what is basically one process.
The furniture industry accounts for 21% of RBU Glues and Impregnating Resins sales and construction around 13% (mainly panels but some laminated beam manufacture). The balance goes to producing chemicals,  fertilisers and for other group customers.
“This spread of industries distinguishes us from our competitors,” said Dr Sonnberger. “Most of them buy urea, melamine, methanol and ammonia and cook the glues. They don’t produce the raw materials as we do – in other words they are not backward-integrated and that is one of our strengths.”
The glues go to particleboard, MDF, OSB and plywood producers; impregnating resins to the production of short-cycle film, paper foils and laminates.
There are four registered BASF trade mark resins: KAURIT for particleboard, comprising UF and UFm (less than 12% melamine content); KAURAMIN for particleboard, comprising MUF and MUPF glues; KAURITEC for MDF production and KAURATEC used mainly for OSB.
The problems of the furniture industry in Europe, and especially Germany, in recent years are well known and, as Dr Sonnberger pointed out, companies all use particleboard and MDF. “Between 1995 and 2001, production has decreased by 34% in value for the overall furniture industry in Germany and consumption has fallen by 33% in the same period,” he said.
“Looking at the global furniture business, the western European trade balance has gone from over three billion US dollars surplus to plus US$0.4bn in 2001, indicating only a slight export in that year. So the import ratio is 35% even though consumption is down, so western European producers are in a bad way.
“For North America, the NAFTA region imports more than it exports, with an import ratio of minus 25% and just under 40% of imports coming from China.
“Eastern Europe and Asia show positive export ratios of 73% and 24% respectively.”
So what does the future hold, according to BASF?
“Our forecast is that imports from eastern Europe and the Far East will increase for the lower-priced mass furniture market, the higher quality production will stay in Europe and the mid-range market will disappear,” said the vice-president.
The company’s market research suggests stronger growth in the repair and remodeling sector and this could be a further opportunity for laminate flooring, Dr Sonnberger suggests. But, he says, there are challenges for the industry. “These are in the areas of cost, innovation to develop the markets for the product and, for the strongest players, globalisation – seeking out the growth areas in the world.”
It seems that all is not positive even for this product, with production in Europe, at 390 million m2, exceeding demand at 295 million m2 in 2002, said Dr Sonnberger.
In NAFTA and Asia, the picture is more promising, with room for imports but installed capacity is increasing, so export opportunities for Europe will decrease further, while China’s rapidly increasing capacity will mean it will have to export.
For panel products, BASF sees particleboard capacity stagnating or decreasing slightly, while MDF and OSB will increase by 5% to 10%, and 10% to 20%, respectively.
Dr Sonnberger also predicts a continuing concentration of manufacture in both the furniture and panel industries – he pointed out that 66% of European MDF capacity is already held by only five companies. Although there is a continuing move towards multi-panel mega-sites in Europe, he does not see an increase in the trend for these companies to make their own resins on site, except in remote areas.
For the future, he believes the western European market for MDF and OSB will continue to grow. And BASF is readying itself for this by increasing its production capacity for melamine-containing glues by installing a new reactor system. Together with ongoing re-engineering of its existing production processes, the capacity for amino-plast glues and resins will increase by around 250,000 tonnes per annum (tpa) to nearly one million tpa by the end of 2004.
“Our strategy is to support these growth segments and to push melamine-containing downstream products in glues and resins and jointly with our customers to drive the innovation process forward,” said Dr Sonnberger. One such innovation is mass coloured MDF, in which the panel is homogeneously coloured throughout and is thus not damaged by scratching. This is an example of employing different chemical competences within the company, as the dyestuff dispersions were also developed by BASF.
Another example is in laminate flooring. The group can supply resins, glues, printing inks, coloured pigments and dispersions, underlay foams, polyurethane and paper additives – an advantage of a diverse group, said Dr Sonnberger.
He concluded: “We will help our customers to be successful in order to survive by offering them reasonably priced glues and resins and looking at ways to reduce their costs by increasing glue reactivity, for example – even though this will reduce our sales of glue per m3 of panel produced. In this business you have to have a long-term commitment to your customers through good and bad times.”

Although Dieffenbacher has been established in Singapore for over 10 years, overseen by the head office in Germany, the company has recently upgraded its presence there with the appointment of a full-time manager with an indepth knowledge of the panel industry in the Asian region.
Andy Heng graduated from the University of Wisconsin in the US, in 1989 and worked in the IT industry in the US for over three years before relocating to Singapore in 1992.
The next 12 years were spent in the wood based panel and high pressure laminate (HPL)  industries in Asia-Pacific and North America including, perhaps most significantly, eight years with the Bumi Raya Group of Indonesia. Here he was marketing, project manager and director involved with various wood based products and investment projects such as particleboard, HPL, plywood, impregnated paper and MDF, including the first short-cycle HPL press in Asia, at Kiara Kristal Sdn Bhd in Johor, Malaysia.
Dieffenbacher wanted to strengthen its position in sales and service in the Asia region and to this end, in April this year,Mr Heng became vice president, business development, of Dieffenbacher Asia-Pacific, with an office in the German Centre at the International Business Park in Singapore. From this base, Mr Heng cooperates closely with Tilman Helmer, area sales manager for Asia, panel division, who is based at the Dieffenbacher headquarters in Eppingen.
“We cover all markets from India to the Philippines and everything in between except China, where Dieffenbacher also has its Beijing office, and South Korea and Japan which are serviced by agents,” said Mr Heng. Since he joined the Singapore office, the company has adopted a new strategy for S E Asia and this month (December) is moving into a new facility in Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia, where it will have a service and spare parts centre.
“We are strengthening our service to customers and bringing that service closer to them,” said Mr Heng. “We will also have an online service in KL so we will be able to solve most problems from there and, if it is necessary to make a service call in person, we will be closer to the customer.”
The KL facility is following the example set by Dieffenbacher’s operations in Windsor, Canada and Beijing, China. Exchange of information and inventory between Beijing and KL is also envisaged.
“The idea of having service centres worldwide is all part of Dieffenbacher’s strategy to strengthen our position as a turnkey supplier, not just a press supplier,” explained Mr Helmer. “We are now established as a supplier of complete systems and of course this makes the whole concept of service centres viable – we couldn’t do it if we were solely a press supplier.”
Mr Helmer also pointed out that the several companies which have joined Dieffenbacher – either as wholly owned subsidiaries or in partnership – in recent years have strengthened the whole company as a systems supplier. Those companies which spring to mind are the former Schenck company and Schenkmann & Piel, both now wholly-owned by Dieffenbacher.
Sister company Dieffenbacher Maschinenfabrik Zaisenhausen (DMZ) GmbH, run by Günter Dieffenbacher for the last 10 years, has always been responsible for the handling side of the Dieffenbacher short-cycle press lines, but since the beginning of this year has been responsible for the complete short-cycle lines. “Additionally we are responsible for the forming line and all the handling operations after the press on panel production lines,” said Mr Dieffenbacher. “This includes double-diagonal saw, star coolers, stacking, storage, sizing saws, handling on and off the sander, including conveyors and all controls.”
“We can see potential for the short-cycle market in Asia as well and this also will be handled by the KL office,” added Mr Helmer.
Intec Engineering is another associate company, offering all energy generation competence. The two companies have been working together in this field for over four years.
“So we now offer everything from the dryer to the finishing line from our own resources – everything except the green end and the sander,” said Mr Helmer. “Since we became a complete system supplier, it has proved to be the right move at the right time.”

It is September 17, 2002 and the priest of Egorievsk is formally consecrating the ground on which the newly formed company OOO Kronospan will build the first phase of its panel manufacturing and processing complex.
Fourteen months later, in November 2003, the first continuous MDF line in Russia has started production.
This was a true ‘greenfield’ project, since all the company had on day one was a very large expanse of ground and a rented office across the road. The ground concerned totals a staggering 140ha of virtually flat terrain mainly surrounded by trees, on the outskirts of this small town which forms part of the Moscow District.
From Egorievsk it is 120km to the capital and only four kilometres to the fourth and outermost of the ring roads which encircle this historic city.
So why did Peter Kaindl, owner of OOO Kronospan and a good number of other panel making factories worldwide, choose Russia for his latest investment? And why Egorievsk?
Markus Habegger, managing director of Egorievsk and several other eastern European factories belonging to the Kaindl group, explains that Russia is a very big country and a very big market.
It also has very little in the way of quality MDF production and virtually nothing in the production of laminate flooring – a prime target sector for the Egorievsk facility.
Russia is, even after the collapse of communism, a very ‘centralistic’ economy with Moscow at its centre. Nobody speaks of ‘Egorievsk’, but of ‘Moscow’, and the Moscow District (with a radius of about 150km) boasts a population of around 20 million people. Those people are perceived to be generally well-educated and to have a steadily increasing spending power.
Road and rail connections between Egorievsk and Moscow are good and gas and electricity supplies are also reliable and available close to the factory site.
Add to that the fact that the Moscow District has the highest concentration of furniture manufacturers in Russia, who are all looking for a good quality supplier of MDF, and you have all your reasons, except one, for building here.
That last reason is one that is common to much of Russia – the raw material resource, which is vast.
There are cheaper places in Russia to develop a new factory and the wood raw material would be cheaper too. Such as Siberia. However, the infrastructure is not as good, the distance to market is too great and, while English and German are quite commonly spoken in Moscow, foreign languages are something of a rarity in more remote areas.
Phase one of the development of the Egorievsk complex consists of several parts. The core is a continuous MDF production line with a design capacity of up to 280,000m3 a year (depending on product specification). At its heart is a Siempelkamp ContiRoll press, 28m long and 2.5m wide.
There is also a brand new laminate flooring production line with a capacity of over 12 million m2 a year, based on the latest generation Hymmen Isopress. This 1.04m wide continuous laminating press is backed up by the latest generation Kronospandesigned and built handling equipment, as used in the company’s factory at Lungötz in Austria. The Hymmen press is equipped with both smooth and engraved continuous stainless steel belts.
Further value-adding capacity is provided by a brand new Wemhöner short-cycle press line. This is intended to offer oneand two-side lamination for mouldings manufacturers, and furniture makers, respectively.
The third part of phase one comprises a wall/ceiling panel manufacturing line with foil lamination.
At the time of my visit in October, a full range of MDF making and value-adding facilities was scheduled to come on stream at the end of November this year, as phase one of the development, also known at the company as the ‘start-up package’.
Kronospan is not a company that buys turnkey packages from anybody for its production lines. It has been in the business long enough, and made enough highly successful new investments, to know exactly what it wants and how to make it. Thus all the value-adding facilities at Egorievsk were built up from a mixture of bought-in machinery, with the flooring line alone having equipment from 20 different suppliers, as well as from Kronospan’s own machinery factory at Presov in Slovakia.
The second part of phase one at Egorievsk is already under way, with the order placed for  a brand new calendar (Mende-type) MDF line to make thicknesses up to 9mm, mainly for wall panelling. Start-up of this second line is planned for the third quarter of 2004 and that will bring total raw MDF capacity at the site up to 400,000m3 per year. A lacquering line is also planned.
Finally, for phase one, a resin plant is scheduled to go into production in Spring 2005 with a capacity of about 80,000 tonnes per annum and at a cost of about 200m. This makes total investment at Egorievsk about 500m, according to Kronospan.
“In Russia we are the first in MDF flooring and value-added products as well as being the first with a continuous MDF production line and a continuous flooring line,” says Mr Habegger.
The final decision to invest in Egorievsk was made in early 2002 with the signing of an investment agreement with the government of the Moscow Region, and the OOO Kronospan company was founded in April of that year.
Sales and marketing activity, based in that rented office, commenced immediately, with products mainly being delivered from Kronospan’s MDF mill in Mielec, Poland. This added to Kronospan’s 10 years of experience in exporting MDF to Russia.
Groundwork at Egorievsk began immediately after the consecration in September 2002.
The woodyard has a plentiful supply of fresh logs, mainly pine and spruce (there are no sawmills in this area to supply residues). The yard is fully concreted to keep the raw material clean and the factory has its own concrete batching plant and this will be kept on and used in the future development of the site.
The logs are conveyed up and over the railway branch line, which comes onto the site from the Egorievsk-Moscow main line, and onto the debarker, then to the hogger line, made up with machinery from a number of suppliers.
Chips go to one of two large cylindrical concrete silos and thence to the top of the refiner building.
An Andritz 46in refiner serves line 1 and a second refiner will be added to feed MDF line 2. The glue kitchen and glue distribution system was supplied by Imal of Italy.
This first MDF line was built up from a number of sources. The basis of it was a secondhand Siempelkamp continuous press of 1996 manufacture from the former Etz Lavud factory in Israel. However, this line was heavily revamped and the pressgiven a much higher capacity, partly by being extended from 18m to 28m, but also by being upgraded with new heating platens and the very latest flexible press entry.
So it is, to all intents and purposes, a new press to the latest Siempelkamp specifications – with additional Kronospan input, of course. There are two star coolers at the end of the line.
Panels are transported by railed transfer truck to the adjacent hall where valueadding takes place.
A Steinemann eight-head sander with conventional metal frame prepares the surfaces of the boards which can then proceed to either the Hymmen or the Wemhöner line for surfacing.
Impregnated paper is currently bought in, but plans are in hand for a possible impregnation line in the future and the space is certainly available for one.
Transfer from the Hymmen press line to the Homag ISE profiling line for laminate flooring is fully automatic by railed transfer truck.
There is a wrapping, packing and strapping line for the laminate flooring.
A large floor space between the flooring line and the Wemhöner line at the time of my visit in early October is now filled with the new wall panelling line, completing the value-adding facilities at Egorievsk – at least for now.
The space beside the ContiRoll line will be filled by the calender press of the second MDF line in due course. This will, of course, be a much shorter line than the ContiRoll.
There is a large warehouse, again fed automatically by railed transfer truck, which will accommodate all Kronospan group products from this factory and others as a ‘one-stop-shop’ facility.
A railway spur also comes into the warehouse so the factory is connected directly with the Moscow-Egorievsk line, both for incoming raw materials and outgoing finished products. Road transport is also used.
An energy plant serves the whole site and will accommodate the needs of the future planned expansions to production. The moving grate furnace runs on gas, wood and dust, or oil, either separately or mixed. The boiler is by Loos International.
There are particular challenges for an energy system in this part of Europe, with temperatures falling as low as -400C in winter and rising to +400C in summer.
This also accounts for the secondary heating room for the thermal oil for the ContiRoll in case the temperature needs topping up in winter.
For electricity supply, while adequate voltage is available from the local grid, a transformer station has been built on site to supply a constant regulated supply of the correct voltage to the factory.
Airborne and waterborne emissions are controlled to normal European standards.
As Mr Habegger pointed out, there are big advantages to building a large factory such as this on a greenfield site; the layout of the line is dictated only by the ideal plan for efficiency in production and not by existing buildings and services.
On the downside, there is massive infrastructure work to be carried out including, in this case, the burying of all services at least 2.2m beneath the surface of the ground because of freezing winter temperatures.
Some piling was required on what is largely sandy ground, particularly for heavy items such as the presses.
The office space for OOO Kronospan is extensive in a light and airy building on the site, which incorporates a large showroom for value-added products.
Samples of laminate flooring, mouldings, postformed worktops, wall panelling and all the accessories for flooring and wall panels are exhibited on purpose-built display modules. The showroom itself also has a laminate floor.
Everything at Egorievsk is designed and built with the future in mind. And that future  contains a lot of expansion plans to make use of what will ultimately be a 180-200ha freehold site.
Kronospan sees a very big future for it. The current ‘start-up’ package is enough for the company to be getting on with for now, but it has “big ideas for the future”. These include a full range of boards – particleboard, OSB and MDF, as well as resin production. There is plenty of room for them.
Ernst Kaindl also has another factory in Russia at Scharija, north east of Moscow, which he took over from a former wood materials combine. That factory currently produces wet-process fibreboard, but has ordered a 48.7m x 9ft Siempelkamp ContiRoll continuous press for the production of MDF/HDF. That line is due to start up in Spring 2004. As at Egorievsk, the Scharija factory is intended to develop into a one-stop-shop producer of all panel types and value-added products.
It is precisely the size of the Kronospan group’s operations which is part of the secret of its success. The group has built up a wealth of knowledge from its many plant start-ups and it is now in a position to do for itself much of what its competitors have to sub-contract out. That includes building machinery such as conveying and handling systems and many other components.
It is also building the press for the second MDF line at Egorievsk utilising its own resources. The entire calender press will be built up from components by Kronospan’s factory in the Czech Republic and at its workshops in Sczecinek.
“We are connected to all Kronospan engineering departments online and share the knowledge and experience of our staff,” says Mr Habegger. “We have eight or 10 nationalities on this site from the group and we network with the rest of the group, online, on hand-phones, and so on.”
The company sees the furniture industry in Moscow as key to the development of Egorievsk and hopes its new factory will act “like a magnet” in attracting new  furnituremaking capacity to the region, driven by the shortage of volume producers of quality MDF and particle board. It is possible that western furniture manufacturers will  also see opportunities for production in the region.
The Kronospan policy, in common with most of its European competitors, is quite clear in terms of how far it will go downstream. “We have no plans to make components or to compete with our customers,”says Mr Habegger.
When it comes to meeting demand for panel products up to that point, though, it is clear there are no discernible limits to the expansion of the company’s operations in Egorievsk – and possibly elsewhere in Russia.

Casco Surfaces claims to be the world’s leading manufacturer of surfacing materials for applications in the woodworking, furniture, flooring and automotive industries.
The company’s largest product group includes melamine film, furniture foil and edgebanding (melamine and polyester) for the furniture and interiors market, while its fastest growing market is in laminate flooring. For this sector, Casco supplies abrasive-resistant overlays, decorative films, under-lays and balancing films.
Phenolic films for various industrial applications such as concrete formwork and commercial vehicle flooring are also manufactured.
The company has expanded its global presence over the last five years and today has two production facilities in North America, one in South America, five in Europe and one in Asia, as well as local service offices in 28 countries.
Until July 2003, Casco Impregnated Papers was part of the Akzo Nobel group of companies. In August 2002, Akzo decided to sell its subsidiary and the announcement generated considerable interest among potential investors, resulting in five ‘finalist bidders’. The ultimate winners were two companies acting as a consortium, paying €114m for the company – the 20th biggest management buyout of 2003 worldwide.
The two investors were Deutsche Beteiligungs AG of Germany and Harvest Partners of the US. The management of Casco also has a minority share in the new company, which, for the time being, is known as Casco Surfaces.
A new name has to be found for the newly independent company but that process takes time and should be completed by the end of January 2004.
Deutsche Beteiligungs is an investment company with 40 years’ experience and is backed by Deutsche Bank, among others. The company’s investment portfolio includes the Lignum Group, comprising the well-known wood machinery manufacturers, Homag and IMA.
Harvest Partners is also an investment company and manages funds for US banks and insurance companies as well as industrial corporations in the US and Europe such as General Electric, ABB and Siemens.
The fact that North America is Casco Surfaces’ largest single market, accounting for 40% of turnover, alone makes Harvest Partners seem a good fit.
John Ahlström has been the chief executive of Casco for some 10 years and has just seen his third ownership change in that time. He feels that the latest owners will take the company forward in a good direction.
“It is very exciting,” he said. “We now have owners interested in and committed to growing the business. We are not a small part of a big business any more. The new owners follow our business closely and understand it thoroughly – they know what we are doing and why we want to do what we want to do.”
Mr Ahlström also feels that the change in ownership came at a good time as he perceives that the industry’s structure is changing, offering new opportunities in the market. “The surfacing materials industry in Europe is composed of lots of small/medium players and, between 2001 and 2003, many companies had a tough time.
We are spread globally and so were less hard hit. There is an opportunity now for us to really do things in Europe,” said the chief executive.
Operationally, the company is split globally into five business units.
Business Unit North America supplies melamine technology, laminate flooring products and technical films. It is headquartered in Cobourg, near Toronto in Canada, with a manufacturing unit also in South Carolina, US.
“The North American growth in surfaces is much stronger than the more mature European market,” said Mr Ahlström. “We started in 1987 with 15 million m2 supplied from Germany and we now have a market of 180 million m2 in Canada and the US. We have been driving the thermally- fused melamine sector in North America.”
Business Unit Europe is located in Essen, Germany. It has the same product range as North America and production units in Kristinehamn, Sweden, Schöppenstedt, Germany, Arches, France and Martorelles, Spain.
Asia-Pacific Business Unit is located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and again has the same range of products.
The fourth Business Unit is outside Curitiba in Paraná state, Brazil, and offers melamine and flooring films.
Burgos in Spain is the major manufacturing centre for the fifth unit, Business Unit Furniture Applications, offering finish foils, edgebands, CPL laminates, polyester laminates and polyester edgebands. This unit is in fact headquartered in Sant Cugat near Barcelona.
Casco Surfaces did not exhibit at the Interzum furniture and interiors exhibition in Cologne in May 2003 as such, but instead took a suite a short walk away at the Hyatt Regency Hotel for the duration of the show.
It used this occasion for the European launch of its new Design Collection. This is a new departure for Casco as, in the past, it either procured designs for the customer from printers, or the customer gave the company printed paper to be impregnated.
“We saw that, with our purchasing leverage, we could bundle designs in purchase orders to gain economy of scale and make a more attractive deal for our customer,” explained Mr Ahlström. “Also the customer can sit down with our staff and discuss designs and trends – we are more independent than the printers in this regard.
“The initiative has been well-received by our customers who like the ‘neutral’ input of our sales people and the ‘one-stop shopping’ concept.”
The Design Collection concept was initially tried in North America in 2001 with success and Casco Surfaces now has 80 designs there and around 70 in Europe. These are mainly wood-grains, but also include solid colours and fantasy designs.
There are three main areas targeted by three Design Collections: North America and Europe, both centred on decorative melamine; and furniture applications, with finish foils, edgebands and laminates.
Casco’s design centre is at Sant Cugat and displays the whole collection plus all the big printers’ collections. A sample of any design, pressed onto a panel, can be supplied on the spot too.
Casco’s designs are selected using the printers’ structures but also using Casco’s own colourways, plus some unique designs for which it has the cylinders engraved specially. “We are actually improving the distribution channel for the printers, so while we may appear to compete with them, we are actually working well together with them,” said Mr Ahlström.
The relative merits of exhibitions are often discussed these days and Casco seems pleased with the results of its ‘Interzum experiment’. “We were pleased with the response to our suite in Cologne and will repeat it in 2005,” said Mr Ahlström.
“The ZOW shows are growing in importance, especially in Bad Salzuflen and Madrid. It is a good concept and it does not require so much time and preparation as the big shows in Europe and North America, which are becoming like stand design competitions. Sometimes the money is better spent on visiting our customers.”
The panel industry is a very important market for Casco Surfaces, accounting for around 85% of the company’s turnover.
Furniture is the second largest and has its own Business Unit because of the complexity of the industry’s structure and the large number of customers in a wide range of sizes, he explained.
So, Casco Surfaces is a new company but with expertise in the same products in which it has specialised for years and with the addition of the Design Collection.
All that remains is for the company to find an appropriate and, just as importantly, a unique, trading name, but we will have to wait to find out what that name will be.

The original Maier company celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2002, having started as a manufacturer of turbines.
The company moved into wood chippers, flakers and hammermills in the 1950s and, while that is still the core of the business, the Maier company has changed a lot since then.
The real turning point came in 1996, when Robert Loth bought the company and took a completely new look at the way it was doing business. For years, it had been selling single machines, which were mainly delivered to the major contractors as part of the supply package for a complete panel production line. And its marketing approach was fixed on the particleboard industry. Today, things are rather different.
“The first thing I did on taking over the business was to switch the sales effort towards the panel mills as direct customers,” says Mr Loth, speaking at his factory in Bielefeld, not far from Hannover. “This put us more in touch with what was happening at the clients’ factories and with what their needs really were.”
Even if Maier does supply through a main contractor, or OEM, today, Mr Loth says the company knows the final client and what he really needs. “This means we can provide a professional after-sales service including information about our developments which, for example, reduce the running costs or increase the quality of flakes and so on,” he says.
“What we would like to emphasise is that the customer should treat the chipper lines, the drum chipper, the flaker, the screen and so on up to the dryer, and the mills after the dryer, as a separate package employing the expertise of the machinery maker. This special know-how of Maier is of benefit to the client and the main contractor. Interfaces today are easy to define and Maier is used to offering a guarantee for this. It is far better for any panel factory to split the whole package into specialist areas.”
Of course Maier still makes a wide range of machines for size reduction and it has made many changes to their designs and method of operation in recent years. The emphasis today, though, is on supplying those machines as part of a ‘frontend package’ to the mills.
As a result of being in touch with its clients’ needs, says Mr Loth, Maier developed technologies such as the 60-knife ring flaker, then high-speed flaking. It moved on to a lot of development of the drum chipper and is now in the area of screening.
All the developments of the chippers, flakers and hammermills have been centred on the quality of chip, flake or strand produced as well as on increasing the efficiency of the process, claims Mr Loth.
The latest major development for Maier is a new trans-Atlantic marketing agreement which it has entered into with Acrowood Corp of the US. This is a ‘two-way street’ arrangement in which Maier offers Acrowood’s products in Europe, while Acrowood offers Maier’s in Canada and Mexico.
The US company brings screening systems, disc chippers and a chip cracker, all of which will give Maier access to the pulp and paper industry.
“Maier is focused on screening fines and oversize material, but the Acrowood screens also select a chip size for the digester in pulp and paper mills,” explains Mr Loth. “Thus the agreement also gives us additional possibilities to enter the MDF industry. With access to the Acrowood technology, we don’t have to start from scratch in this area. Also, Acrowood has a strong presence in the OSB industry.
“We successfully developed two-stage flaking for OSB two years ago but didn’t have the equipment to screen the strands until now. Acrowood’s technology adds this and so we can now offer flaking and screening right through to the wet strand silo.”
In many OSB mills, the strander can become the bottleneck as line capacities increase and it is expensive and really ‘overkill’ to install a second strander, explains Mr Loth.
“Our two-stage flaking lowers the cost and increases the range of sizes of wood raw material which can be used – small wood, recycled, crooked, whatever,” he says. The two stages are a drum chipper then a flaker. “It is an ideal system for all cheap kinds of wood because they can go directly to the drum chipper or to the flaker,” he adds.
A new product from Maier is the Heavy Particle Separator (SGA), showcased at Ligna in Hannover last May. This includes non-ferrous separation because more recycled wood is going through the knife ring flaker and a lot of aluminium and other non-ferrous metals can be contained in it.
“You normally have a big non-ferrous separator in the line after the screens and the efficiency of these big machines is not always the best because they are running large quantities, so we have installed the SGA in front of the knife ring flaker or mill,” says Mr Loth. “If you have a six to eight tonne recycling throughput, you can use the SGA, or if you have a higher volume, you can use it as an additional station.”
The SGA works by having an infeed chute with detectors below, which work by using an electric field and automatically operate one of three or four flaps to reject unwanted material with minimal loss of wood. The system can be retro-fitted to older particle separators or adapted to fit flakers and mills made by other manufacturers where the air does not pass through the rotor as it does in Maier machines.
Mr Loth points out that most of his company’s major developments have come about because of the needs of customers, using two contracts in Germany to illustrate his point.
For Glunz at Meppen, Maier refurbished a 1989 chipper by another supplier and also supplied the infeed lines, including long log and slab conveyors, a vibration feeder and electrical controls. All this was integrated with existing conveyors as well, in an upgrade of the existing line.
For Kronotex’s mill in Wittstock in Germany, Maier supplied a long log flaker and vibration conveyor, as well as a conveyor for bought-in chips. Then came the drum chipper and a silo to coordinate with the existing silos. The job included all electrical equipment and was carried out as a turnkey contract by Maier.
But this company is setting its sights much further afield than just Europe. In September 2003, it received an order from Fuzhou Particleboard, which was adding a new particleboard line to its existing one.
“We offered four knife ring flakers with a knife ring for normal flakes of 0.5-0.7mm and another set of KFRs for 0.25-0.35mm for homogenous board, so the customer can switch from homogenous to standard board,” explains Mr Loth.
The contract also includes a Maier automatic grinding machine in which the operator enters the specific number of the ring and the grinder automatically knows if it is a 0.5mm or 0.25mm ring.
This is Maier’s first major contract in China; several others are under discussion.
Maier has an agent in Beijing, Beijing Europe-China S&T Trade Co Ltd, run by Stephan Dong. It also represents other German companies which together give Mr Dong’s company coverage of the front end, the middle and the finishing end of panel making lines.
He also has good connections with clients and universities in China.
In South East Asia, Maier won the order for Vanachai of Thailand’s new particleboard line to supply flaking and milling, and a dumping chain conveyor followed by a vibration conveyor before the drum chipper, and an additional slabs conveyor.
The MPM mill supplied for this contract for surface layer material has new grinding tracks which can be combined to adjust the fineness of the material.
“Vanachai had high demands on the surface quality of its board and this gave the impetus to the development of these grinding tracks,” explains Mr Loth, using the point to underline one of his central philosophies for Maier.
“We are changing ourselves as quickly as the market is changing, to increase our ability to respond quickly.”