Bietigheim-based company RSG Automation increases sales with many orders – “Did not have one cancellation”
by WOLF-DIETER RETZBACH
BIETIGHEIM-BISSINGEN. The walls in the building of the Bietigheim-based company RSG Automation Technics have recently been reduced by one. It had to be removed, because more space is needed for facilities and production lines, which are being built in the company.
Production at RSG Automation is running at full speed: “We are flooded with orders at present,” said marketing and sales director Maik Eisenhardt. This statement can also be translated into numbers: “For this year, we are expecting a sales growth of about 100 percent,” reported managing director Andreas Ecker, “the orders are already in”. And in the coming weeks, there will be incoming orders accounting to a volume of more than 4 to 5 million euros. Those are orders already for 2021, despite the corona crisis: “So far, we have not had a single cancellation,” said Eisenhardt of the past weeks. “Surprisingly, the currently crisis-ridden sectors of the automotive and aviation industries are the ones actually investing in RSG systems,” said Eisenhardt. These companies want to lay the foundations for the post-crisis period now, so that they can then use new RSG machines to manufacture their products “faster, more efficiently, and more cost-effectively than their competitors”.
Establishment in the USA with the help of YouTube
According to Andreas Ecker, the rapid growth of RSG has to do with the fact that the company has been able to gain a foothold over the past 5 years in the USA – above all with the company's own YouTube site, through which the company generates many orders also overseas. Because US president Donald Trump has decreed that companies should produce less in China and more in their own country, US companies should now automate their production more – and therefore order machinery in Europe and Germany, i.e. where system engineering is more highly developed and complex than in the USA.
At RSG, production employees are currently working on twelve machines, all of which are to be delivered to North America. Many facilities go from Bietigheim also to Mexico, South America, and traditionally, to other European countries. According to Eisenhardt, orders came in from Switzerland, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Portugal, and Great Britain in the weeks of the corona crisis.
Recently, there have been specific inquiries also from Italy – companies which, as other European companies, will have reconsidered during the corona crisis: away from textile production in low-wage countries, away from the risk of global supply chains collapsing in a crisis like the present one, away from a dependence on the Asian market, and towards stronger local and regional production in Europe and in Germany. “Globalization cannot mean that everyone gets everything from China,” emphasized Ecker.
At present, there are many inquiries from the southwest for systems that make medical products, e.g. for hospitals and medical practices. Eisenhardt described the trend from which RSG benefits as: “These urgently needed products are to be manufactured locally and independently again”. According to the sales director, a Baden-Württemberg-based manufacturer of medical products has recently placed a major order. The customer hopes to use the requested system to meet the increased demand for its products during the corona pandemic.
