Please tell us a bit about the company and why you're here today.
WIKA is an instrumentation company. One of our focus markets is obviously chemical and petrochems, and as well food and pharma, which are the main targets of ACHEMA. Therefore, this is one of our main shows.
Of course, there are a lot of supporting industries, like power and base materials, which support the focus markets.
This means we are a complete outfitter. It’s a global show and we have 43 subsidiaries. So we are certainly a global company.
What are you showcasing at ACHEMA this week?
We have new products, and of course portfolio additions, which are also partially merger and acquisitions.
This year we are exhibiting a full line of process valves, which you usually, as a complimentary product, buy for our instruments. We can now supply the customer with complete mounted solutions which basically saves time, costs, and of course logistical handling efforts.
We have new products which we are showing especially for this market. It's chemical, so we have special solutions for all types of reactor.
What we try to do is support and offer solutions for the two or three main targets of this industry. One is for efficiency. One is risk prevention, which means any kind of disaster or processes that are out of control. Additionally, with risk and disaster prevention, security.
For example, we have several patented solutions here. Basically, what these do is protect the processes. We make sure that we don't have incorrect ingredients going into the pharmaceutical products, and how we install security improves product cleanness and product integrity.
What do you think makes you unique?
We have a lot of businesses which are also in the instrumentation business and they also have solutions. But our specialty is high pressures.
For example, plastics and environmental protection. If you just envision that the plastic bag could produce this - you have a very complicated low-density polyethylene process and the coefficients of this process are 3,600 bar around about 6 to 700 degrees Celsius, which cause enormous vibrations. In the products and instrumentation which control this process, they must be able to cope with these tremendous influences during this process. It’s also not an easy process. It can be very dangerous because, as I said, you have high pressure. It's like an explosion. Therefore, for high pressure we have very special products.
We also have special products for the pharmaceutical industry. Safety is important but so is efficiency. It means you have to clean these instruments. The amount of steel and the process time of our products means an easy clean ability – it’s very important.
We’ve done this for more than fifty years. It's a family owned business, and it's very entrenched in engineering. We have a lot of experience and we are global – we have a global service hub, a global engineering hub, and a global logistic.