Mexico City — Prolific Mexican inventor Sergio Beutelspacher Sandoval has added a PLC control system to the range of extruders built by his eponymous company.
The technology was displayed on the Beutelspacher booth at Plastimagen México 2023. It confirms that even though he's about to turn 90, the engineer has no intention of slowing down.
The list of machines he has designed and developed exceeds 1,200, according to his own estimates. He is a no-nonsense, hands-on managing director who goes into his office in eastern Mexico City every day.
Belying his advanced age, he regularly attends major plastics industry events both in Mexico and abroad.
Many of his extruders and blow molding machines have been shipped across the Americas and as far as China. He has created stretch film- and PET bottle-producing technology among dozens of other inventions.
He has a passion for material advancement, in particular reinforced plastic, which he claimed in an interview with Plastics News in 2009, is a tougher and more durable option for the construction industry than reinforced concrete.
A mechanical engineering graduate of Mexico's National Polytechnic Institute, he founded Beutelspacher SA de C. in Mexico City in 1978, 11 years after launching his first company, Plásticos y Maquinaria Especializada SA (PYMESA).
At its launch his company competed with two dozen local rivals and others from outside the country. Forty-five years later it is the only Mexican developer of technology for the plastics industry that is still in business.
The company employs 100 people and Beutelspacher says he is "acutely aware" of his responsibility towards the families that his employees support.
He was born on Jan. 9, 1934. His grandfather was a Baptist missionary from southwestern Germany who arrived in Mexico in 1910, the year the Mexican revolution broke out. His parents were both Mexican.
In 1967 Beutelspacer married María de la Luz Salas Dufau. The couple have four children, three sons, Adrian, Abraham and Sergio Jr, and a daughter, Mayra. All have critical roles in the running of the business.
"You have always helped the plastics community to the best of your ability," Mexico's plastics industry association Anipac declared in a special tribute to Beutelspacher in the city of Morelia, western Mexico, in 2017.
"You are the only Mexican who has dared to go to the United States and to offer machinery for sale using technology that is 100 percent Mexican because you are the only one who makes it."
The testimonial added: "You have created a prosperous company, a united and good family and your career has been exemplary.
"You have always been a fighter, fighting fairly in the face of so many stumbling blocks that we, as a developing country, are obliged to accept.
"But in particular, [engineer] Beutelspacher, we recognize your trajectory because of what you have said on so many occasions, which is that we 'must work hard, not so much for money but to strive always to be the best' — and you in this industry are the best."