Outlook 2025: Local-to-local strategy for efficient and sustainable production

Mr. Michael Hehl, Managing Partner, ARBURG

At Fakuma, ARBURG presented its latest models which are geared to respond to current and future demands. We brought to this exhibition one more new addition:  the electric Allrounder 720 E Golden Electric, which was premiered at NPE in the United States and Plastpol in Poland – both in 2024.  Due to our increased internationalisation activities, we debuted our "big electric model" in the US, where it met with great interest.

In connection with internationalisation, we are pursuing a local-to-local strategy and are currently looking into the possibilities of internationalising various stages of the value chain. Areas of focus in this context include local sourcing and assembly. While our ALLROUNDERs were previously built exclusively at our German headquarters in Lossburg, in future we will also assemble machines in Asia and North America.

We took an initial step towards a local-to-local approach several years ago with our ARBURG Technology Factories, or ATFs for short. ATFs have been set up in the Czech Republic, at our Chinese location in Pinghu and at our US headquarters in Rocky Hill, Connecticut. In these factories, Allrounders are tailored to customer-specific requirements and turnkey systems are implemented in cooperation with local mould and peripheral equipment suppliers.

The next step is the assembly of complete machines in China and, in future, also in North America. The first of these are the Allrounder Golden Electric EVO machines in China, which are tailored to the Asian market and, in line with the local-to-local approach, are only available there. They are assembled in the Pinghu ATC. 

One topic that is very close to my heart and firmly rooted in ARBURG's DNA is the complex issue of sustainability, various aspects of which are brought together in our arburgGREENworld platform. We are very active in this area, both within our company and on behalf of our customers, with our range of products, applications and services.This year, for example, in addition to the usual ARBURG Sustainability Report, we also published a sustainability report in accordance with Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards, thereby making ARBURG's extensive activities internationally comparable.