As everyone knows, Fakuma provides us with an outstanding forum for presenting innovations to international experts, as well as for maintaining relations with existing customers and establishing contact with new customers. For us, it’s this year’s most significant trade fair in Europe and an important trend barometer for 2013 – for the entire industry sector. We were very satisfied with Fakuma 2012. The visitors were in a very optimistic mood, although this was garnished with a bit of restraint regarding expectations for the future.

Our booth was very well frequented on all trade fair days, and the expert visitors demonstrated great interest in our displays and exciting applications which, in some cases, were truly quite sensational.

We apparently hit the bull’s eye with our meta-topic involving production efficiency as a further development of the “energy efficiency” issue, which is a crucial concern for our customers. Where recognising and exploiting all available potential for increasing efficiency is concerned, the entire value creation sequence has to be taken into consideration. This is why we explicitly elucidate the advantages of each exhibited product with reference to production efficiency. With regard to the development of new products exhibited in Friedrichshafen as well, our goal has always been to increase economic efficiency in producing injection mouldings. In the machine sector, this includes the new 630 A size for the electrical Alldrive range, the productivity package for the hydraulic Golden Edition range and the energy-saving servo-hydraulic drive concept for our hydraulic Allrounder S with closing forces from 2500 to 5000 kN. The fact that our innovative force goes well beyond the machine sector is demonstrated by world’s firsts in the applications and process sectors which we’ve developed in cooperation with our partners: long-fibre direct injection moulding, particle-foam composite injection moulding and inline printing.

Fakuma has continued with its trend towards internationalism. As a result, we’ve been able to greet guests from overseas once again this year, for example customers from Brazil and Singapore. New contacts have been established above all in the packaging industry. In addition to presentations and information, very intensive personal meetings were once again at the foreground at this year’s event, which are a tradition at Fakuma. In order to be able to attend to all of our guests from inside and outside of Germany, we had an average of 150 Arburg employees at our 2-story booth each day. With roughly 1300 square metres of floor space, we were the biggest exhibitor once again this year. In addition to this, there were large numbers of Allrounder injection moulding machines distributed throughout Fakuma: with more than 20 displays and numerous applications at our own booth and at the booths of other exhibitors, we were able to impressively demonstrate the performance capabilities and the broad range of applications of our machines and manufacturing cells. And this means that Fakuma has been, is, and will remain our trade fair during non-K years!

Dr. Christoph Schumacher, head of marketing and corporate communication

After our company had an absolutely record breaking Fakuma in 2011, we were eager to see if the 2012 event would pick up smoothly where we left off last year. And we haven’t been disappointed, because the trade fair has gone exceptionally well for us once again this year and we’ve been able to set new company records. For example, we broke our all-time Fakuma personal daily record for the number of qualified trade fair reports on Wednesday – and that’s really saying something because we’ve been participating right from the very start. Another company record breaker this year was the presentation of three world premieres at a single event, which we exhibited at our booth: a water-free dynamic tempering process with CO₂, a cooling unit with an energy efficiency factor of 10 and a further development of our water quantity regulating system for injection moulding.

Our experience indicates that Fakuma 2012 was more international than ever before. We received highly targeted RFQs from both inside and outside of Germany. Despite all of the gloomy predictions, visitors at our booth are planning large projects and investments, and we’re very pleased that we’ve been able to take a large number of concrete projects home with us from Fakuma 2012.

Dipl.-Ing. Helmut Gries, director of sales and marketing

We’ve been exhibiting at Fakuma for many years and have registered continuously increasing visitor numbers over the years. Visitor numbers increased significantly at our booth once again this year. In addition to targeted development of new products, concentrated and careful event preparation conducted by our team has paid off as well. As a mid-sized company, we take advantage of opportunities to penetrate new areas of business and niche markets in a flexible fashion. New products generate great interest and thus lots of RFQs from existing partners and new contacts established at Fakuma. In particular our developments in the field of natural fibre compounds and POLYWOOD A – a wood compound with an antibacterial additive – have met with considerable interest. As a result, we’re expecting good post-event business and are already looking forward to Fakuma 2014.

Martin Bühler, sales director

Our motto – “Creating Value in Production” – attracted swarms of visitors to the Wittmann Battenfeld communal booth on all five days of the trade fair. The number of registered trade fair leads and the high level of concluded business deals significantly exceeded our expectations, as well as results achieved last year. Numerous product innovations, our booth and the joint appearance of the Wittmann group drew tremendous attention from customers and other interested parties. Above all exhibits of our structural foam application (Cellmould®) in combination with variable thermal tempering (BFMOLD®), as well as the W 822 robot with DynamicDrive attracted special attention. In particular, visitors at our booth appreciated our complete consulting services for the comprehensive product range of the Wittmann group in a familiar trade fair setting. As was also the case in previous years, Fakuma has once again proven to be our most important platform for the German market. And this year as well, we’ve been able to greet many customers and interested parties from Europe and from overseas.

Andreas Hollweg, sales manager

As a longstanding Fakuma exhibitor, we hold this trade fair in high esteem as a platform which everyone wants to visit – an overall concept which ideally fits into our plan. Of course we exhibit our traditional offerings as well as our new products at the event. We focus on offering solutions which have been worked out in a cooperative dialogue with our customers. With its familiar atmosphere, Fakuma provides an ideal setting to this end.

Fakuma 2012 went very well for us, and feedback from the expert visitors was excellent. We find it especially good that in addition to the decision makers, people from production visit Fakuma as well, who are looking for solutions to concrete problems. We’ve set up a service point at out booth specifically for this purpose. People from production, as well as from administration, always find a competent contact person here for direct advice and problem solving. All in all, our concept works well. We’re not experiencing any kinks in the order pipeline – or order books are full.

Rüdiger Kissinger, marketing manager

For us, Fakuma is the most important trade fair in Europe aside from K. Our expectations were accordingly high, and have even been exceeded. We received lots of praise from the visitors for out 2-story booth with 300 square metres of floor space – the FERROMATIK LOUNGE in black with white furniture and red decorations. Our booth was very well visited right from the start, and we were highly satisfied with the quality of our meetings as well.

Our three machine exhibits were absolutely new and attracted visitors like a magnet. Our chickPacks drew special attention – a fresh egg package with an orange bottom and a transparent lid decorated with a sunny-side-up label. We produced them on the first multicomponent machine from the new, modular F series. The first fully electric cube machine from the F series, with a cube mould from Foboha, was also a crowd puller at the trade fair. Last but not least, many visitors were interested in the second generation of the fully electric ELEKTRON range with its new design and controller.

All in all, we very much like the atmosphere at Fakuma: attractive exhibition halls with lots of daylight in the middle of a beautiful landscape.

Julia Andris, marketing manager

For us, Fakuma is the most important trade fair in Germany. We intend to expand our presence here in the future. Our trade fair presentation in 2012 was very successful. We greatly changed our approach this year and are visibly offering solutions in all areas. Our range of products has included fully electric injection moulding machines since 1984, and is now fully in trend with regard to low energy consumption. In combination with our robots, visitors are presented with entire process sequences from a single source at our booth. As an international market leader in the field of electric injection moulding machines, we were even able to celebrate a European premiere at this year’s Fakuma. It’s an entirely new machine model which arrived just-in-time from Japan on Monday and was already on display at Fakuma on Tuesday. This machine is equipped with our own CNC controls, which are more up-to-date than anything else available on the market at the moment. It also boasts extremely low energy consumption. The expert visitors demonstrated correspondingly great interest.

Rainer Zerr, sales manager Germany ROBOSHOT

Sumitomo (SHI) Demag is able to look back at a very successful trade fair. We were once again able to increase the number of leads in comparison with the last event, which above all can be attributed to further increases in the number of visitors from outside of Germany. As an international company with a global network, Sumitomo (SHI) Demag is a convincing option for foreign plastics processors.

The visitors’ interest in the issue of production efficiency was unfailingly high. We showed interested parties at our booth how to actively influence the production efficiency of their injection moulding machines with the help of our active technology modules. Fakuma enjoys unbroken importance within the industry sector. A trade fair by experts, for experts and decision makers, in a close-knit industry setting is the ideal environment for targeted customer canvassing.

Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Bernd Tröger, marketing manager

One again this year, Fakuma was a complete success from our point of view. Within the setting of a new booth concept, we were able to present our broad range of offerings and innovations for various industry sectors to large numbers of visitors in an attractive manner.

As far as content is concerned, lightweight automotive design concepts were in great demand, especially fibrous composite materials. In addition to this we were able to present a series application, namely the seat shell for the Opel Astra OPC, as well as a study for a convertible roof module. However, it was also exciting for the visitors to see that not only weight is involved where substitutes for metal are concerned: heat shields in charge-air distributors for four cylinder diesel passenger cars can be produced better and easier from a new, especially heat-resistant plastic. And the fact that plastics which were originally developed for automobile manufacturing are also used in other areas was made apparent by a simple push-fit system for gardening equipment. High levels of stability are of course required in this area as well. A new product which was probably a surprise for many visitors was our assembly components for photovoltaic systems. One of these exhibition showpieces is already in series production. On the basis of a prototype for photovoltaic module support stands and freeform surfaces for which the weight-bearing components are made of plastic, we were also able to demonstrate that there’s still lots of potential for other applications as well. And thus again and again, Fakuma is as special opportunity for us for an inter-industry exchange of ideas which makes it possible to detect this sort of potential and exploit it.

Dr. Rainer Büschl, director of Communications Performance Polymers