THE FULL SERVICE PROVIDER FLSmidth is a leader in the supply of equipment and services to the global cement and minerals industries. Peter Mercer reports on the company’s success in leveraging its expertise in cement technology into minerals processing and its fast-growing customer services business.
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LSmidth won its first contract for a cement plant, near Limhamm in Sweden, in 1887. Today the Danish company supplies the cement and minerals industries globally with engineering, single machines and complete processing plants as well as comprehensive maintenance and support services that range up to the complete operation of customers’ processing facilities. FLSmidth currently offers its full service solutions in six core focus industries: cement, coal, iron ore, copper, gold and fertilisers; its technologies and services range from material handling in the quarry through the entire processing operations of the end product. Headquartered at Valby, near Copenhagen, a site it moved to in 1956, FLSmidth today employs more than 15,000 people all over the world and had revenues in 2013 of €3.6bn. Until the later part of the 20th century the company was focused on designing and 102 Industry Europe
producing machinery for the cement industry. It introduced the coal-fired rotary kiln to the European market at the end of the 19th century – an innovation from the USA that revolutionised cement production – and by the 1950s FLSmidth machinery was used in 40 per cent of all cement production in the entire world. In the following years the company continued to introduce new machines and processes that reinforced its position as a technology leader in the industry, including the ATOX vertical mill, which combined the grinding, separation and drying processes into a single unit. Since the 1980s FLSmidth has sold more than 300 ATOX mills.
Refocusing and expansion Then, following the economic recession of the 1980s, FLSmidth began to diversify into a number of other businesses until it had grown into a Group of some 125 companies in which two thirds of sales were in non-core
activities. However at the beginning of the 21st century it was decided to dispose of the Group’s non-strategic interests and refocus on the development and production of equipment, production plants, systems and services for the global cement and minerals industries. This return to the company’s roots was marked in 2006 when it was awarded a contract by Holcim to supply the world’s biggest cement production line at Ste Genevieve, Missouri, in the USA. At the same time the company began a series of strategic acquisitions that would enable it to expand its services into the minerals industries. Perhaps the most important of these was the acquisition in 2007 of the process division of the Canadian company GL&V, consisting of Dorr-Oliver Eimco and Krebs Engineers. The expertise in separation equipment for the metals and minerals industries that this purchase brought to the Group enabled FLSmidth to offer customers
