Startup machinery firm PlastiVation on the rise

Friedrichshafen, Germany — As a young start-up company, the troubling economic conditions in Europe has not landed PlastiVation Machinery GmbH in the same situation as many of its competitors.

"We've all read that our industry performance is down by at least 15 percent compared to last year," CEO Thomas Strecker said.

"The great advantage for us is that our sales levels started from a very low point, so, unlike the established names in the plastics machinery manufacturing sector, we have very little to lose. In fact, for us, the past year has been good. We've supplied 10 times as many machines as the year before," he said.

Founded in 2021, PlastiVation became an independent company within Tederic Group, a China-based global mechanical engineering company, in April 2024. Munich-based PlastiVation supplies the Tederic NEO series injection molding machines to customers in the DACH and Benelux region.

Under the umbrella of its Chinese mother, the company is now focusing on consolidating positive order development and building out its customer care approach.

"We've now reached the stage where we can accelerate the process. At the beginning, the biggest problem was name recognition — the awareness of our existence. Most potential customers hadn't ever heard of us, let alone know how to find us. I think we're now beyond that. We have some momentum and we are starting to receive more and more requests, including from a number of well-known companies, and we have also already received orders from bigger companies," Strecker said.

"In general, we are quite positive about the future. Yes, the market today is difficult. But we are continuing to implement improvements and new developments: as soon as the economy recovers, we will be ready for our customers," he said. "And, importantly, we have a strong owner in China, that is well able to realize short delivery times. Because when it happens, I expect it will gain traction faster than we expect."

PlastiVation, in common with many of its competitors, is relying heavily on customization to meet the needs of its customers.

"Our true strong point is our ability to listen to the customer, to fully understand the application and then to offer a fully tailor-made, and if desired, turnkey solution that exactly fits the customer's requirements," Strecker said.

"For example, say a customer is having issues when processing a material. If he tells us what the material is and what the problems are, we'll design and manufacture an individualized screw design that solves the issues," he added.

Such an approach, however, requires PlastiVation to have direct access to know-how in the different areas of expertise.

"Our aim is to be able to offer the whole package, without having to do everything in house. We have therefore established a network of strategic partners with whom we work and cooperate with fully and in depth," he said. "Our latest partner is Sensofact, a young Dutch company that supplies smart monitoring systems for energy consumption and machine maintenance. We have found that demand for features like this, as well as for more and more complex automation, is rising."

A project team is assembled to conduct the project from the first RFQ to the formal sign off, Strecker said, ensuring the customer deals with the same contact person throughout.

"This also makes it easier for the customer, as they are grappling with issues such as employees who are increasingly less familiar with the industry, or even a lack of employees able to handle such projects," he explained. "We make it as easy as possible for them. Our people know almost all production, application and control processes inside out."

The 2023 Fakuma show saw PlastiVation's launch of the second generation of Tederic's NEO injection molding machines, following the introduction of the first Tederic NEO machines on the market two years ago.

The then-new generation expanded the series, adding models with significantly higher clamping force sizes and more advanced technology; PlastiVation also engineered numerous improvements to their technical performance — a technology upgrade that, says the company, puts these on a par with European-made injection molding machines.

"Now, we are working on further improvements, including cloud storage application programming interfaces that enable customers to store and access machine and processing data in the cloud," Strecker said.

But the machines themselves will also become smarter, added Maximilian Wank, lead digital solutions architect at PlastiVation.

"One of the partners we work with — and really rely on — is Linz, Austria-headquartered Keba, who builds control systems for applications of all kinds and which has modules for nearly everything you can think of. So, all the interfaces important for the European market, like Europe map 77 and the interfaces to the robots, all come from Keba and are already integrated — we can connect the machine to any MES system the customer is using.

Our philosophy is that it's more important to integrate machines into existing things and existing frameworks than to build from scratch. There are already hundreds of MES solutions in the market. It makes more sense — to us — to focus on integration, to match with the market," he clarified.

The company offers the technical assistance systems ServiceNet and EasyNet, which make remote troubleshooting and software maintenance possible, for example.

"We are currently writing the road map for the development of further smart options next year," Wank said. "Because we are relatively new, we first had to assess what was already out there."

He visited the Tederic site this year to take stock of the solutions that were already available and those that were not.

"What is the low-hanging fruit and what are the difficult problems? A smart option like condition monitoring, for example, is always very difficult. It takes a long time and special skills from people like application engineers and data scientists to develop," he said. "You need long term trials. We've already made some progress and are currently conducting tests on the hydraulic machines. I think we will be ready to show something at the latest at the K show — and maybe even ChinaPlas."

The demand for these options is there, Strecker said.

"The difficulty for customers is to determine where the added value for them is. But the conditions in Europe — high energy costs, too few skilled workers, regulations — are increasingly driving the need for smarter machines that can be easily operated by people who are less well-trained. And that's where we can help: after we are sure we understand the question, we can put together a fully customized solution that exactly fits the problem."

He added that the need for these solutions had been far less of an issue in China, where shortage of labor was not a problem, thus making it less imperative to develop intelligent machines. He called it a mismatch between the machine and the European market that PlastiVation is remedying by "ramping up these solutions for that market."