Fifty years of plant building expertise

Steeped in tradition yet passionate about utilising the latest technological and engineering solutions, industrial plant solutions provider Kremsmueller Industrieanlagenbau is celebrating its first 50 years and is looking forward to its next 50. Emma-Jane Batey spoke to the managing director, Gregor Kremsmueller to find out more.

Established in 1961 in Steinhaus, near Wels in upper Austria, a region famed for its extensive engineering capabilities, Kremsmueller Industrieanlagenbau, or Kremsmueller Industrial Plant Construction KG, has been supporting, planning and implementing complex industrial projects for just over half a century.

Starting out as a provider of highly skilled personnel for industrial projects, the business rapidly grew to include capabilities to offer project handling from a technical perspective too, including total responsibility for the supervision of the project. This foundation has proved valuable for the company. Managing director Gregor Kremsmueller told Industry Europe, “From the 1970s onwards, Kremsmueller also started to manufacture equipment and apparatus suited to the types of projects we were working on, including the pressure vessels that we have become known for, with practically all our products made specifically for individual customers. We still rarely make anything twice, and certainly not three times.”

The company’s core business is industrial construction, with Kremsmueller Industrieanlagenbau representing the largest and most important company of the Kremsmueller Group. Offering the construction of industrial plants, its skills include instrumentation and control, services and projects such as programming automation of specific plants and the delivery and installation of switch cabinets. A recently completed project saw Kremsmueller install 80 switch cabinets in a Sibirian cement and steel plant and includes the ongoing support and plant start-up requirements. Past, present and future

Kremsmueller is widely appreciated for the value it places on tradition, including traditional skills, customer service and dedication to quality. Yet it has also built a well-deserved reputation for keeping a position at the forefront of the industry’s trends and changing demands. Mr Kremsmueller considers this balance an important ingredient in the company’s recipe for success. He said, “We are unique in that our experience, our customer relationships and our facilities have been built up over 50 years. This puts us in a strong position, particularly as we have a tradition for following our customers wherever they may need us in the world.”

While Kremsmueller is active worldwide, it does not simply analyse markets and industrial structures in order to open a new branch or subsidiary, but rather it starts with

a project request from an existing customer and expands accordingly. This approach means that Kremsmueller is primarily predicting organic expansion over the coming years, with potential acquisitions in niche skill areas if required.

This ‘follow the customer’ approach is largely how Kremsmueller has grown in recent years. With one of its oldest and biggest clients being the Austrian oil company OMV, a valued partner for nearly 50 years, it has long had a stable foot in the petrochemical industry. Mr Kremsmueller continued, “As a result of OMV’s acquisition of Romania’s largest oil refinery and requesting our support in bringing the plant up to European standards, we established our own Romanian subsidiary. Consequently we have been responsible for the entire instrumentation and control and now employ more than 400 people in Romania alone. It’s a continuous process and one which perfectly illustrates how our business has grown in a sustainable manner.”

As a proud ‘universal supplier’, Kremsmueller is open to working with industrial clients in any sector. While its core business traditionally lies in the petrochemical sector, it is also involved in many other sectors like the pulp and paper, building materials and food sectors, particularly in light of the fact that the global recession has highlighted the importance of not being too reliant on any one sector.

Mr Kremsmueller said, “We are also increasingly active in the building and servicing of petrol stations. This is one area where we can utilise some product standardisation and we have acquired a small software company in order to facilitate this. The company’s core product is specialised business software for petrol stations and we intend to offer custom applications for our industrial clients too. It’s a new direction for us and one that holds many exciting opportunities and projects.”

Interesting opportunities

In order to continue to create new opportunities and meet the demands of existing customers, Kremsmueller regularly invests in the facilities at its headquarters. With state-ofthe-art equipment, technological facilities and research capabilities gaining investment as well as continual training of personnel, the company has spent more than €20 million on a big upgrade project over the last few years.

Mr Kremsmueller expects the company’s growth to continue in its proven ‘follow the customer’ strategy as well as working on increasingly technologically driven projects. He concluded, “We want to ensure that we are utilising our extensive experience to the best of its advantage, both for us and for our customers. We believe that high-end technological projects such as those using exotic materials will make up a growing portion of our future projects. We also expect to be more involved with sustainable projects, such as the recent major tender we’ve participated in for a large hydroelectric power plant.” n