Based in Marchtrenk, Austria, on the northeastern outskirts of Wels, today's Starlim Sterner Group started life with establishment of the Franz Sterner GmbH Werkzeugbau mold making company in 1974, which built its first LSR injection tool in 1978.
Starlim's mold making now takes place fully automatically, 24/7, as the only feasible cost-efficient solution in a high-wage economy like Austria's. Making its own molds keeps know-how in-house and 5µm precision, as needed to ensure precise molding and effective sealing. That is important to prevent the loss of LSR, in an extremely low-viscosity.
Molding activities started within the company with formation of a rubber and plastics processing subsidiary in 1984 that took on the Starlim Spritzguss GmbH name in 2004, an operation that presently molds 14 billion silicone rubber parts annually, mostly in LSR. That's almost two parts each year for everyone in the world.
Starlim is highly vertically integrated as it produces all its own molds solely for its own molding production, but not for external processors.
The company is proud of the precision with which it produces silicone moldings, with earlier defect rates of 0.7 parts per million achieved in 2015 having been reduced to 0.5 ppm, "with 0.4 ppm planned to be the next big step," explained Karl Großalber, vice president of marketing and sales. CEO Thomas Bründl has pointed out, "Zero defects do not exist, also not only purely statistically."
