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Corporate
Rasselstein hits over 1.5m tons of tin plate in one year
For the first time in the company’s history, workers at Rasselstein GmbH have produced 1,500,000 tons of tinplate within a year. Only a few days before the end of the fiscal year, the final 9-ton coil taking the total over the one-and-a-half million mark left the coating line and was packaged in the new finished-parts store ready for shipment to Impress, Erftstadt.
- Director Heinz Pafferath (5th from left) and works council chairman Wilfried Stenz (4th from left) congratulate workers on the 1,500,000th ton of tinplate produced in the current fiscal year.
It is only five years since workers at Germany’s only tinplate plant celebrated the production of a million tons in a year. Since the concentration of production at Andernach five years ago, the company has posted an incredible increase in output, achieved in two phases. In phase one, the capacity of existing equipment was increased to around 1.2 million tons, while in phase two 160 million euros was invested in new equipment to push capacity to 1.4 million tons per year. The new facilities have been in operation since 2005. “The fact that we have been able to go to the very limit of our capacity is due to demand from our customers for top-quality tinplate,” explains Rasselstein director Karl-Ernst Friedrich. Thanks to a particularly smooth production workflow and sufficient supplies of flat-rolled steel from parent company ThyssenKrupp Steel, as well as “the flexibility of the workforce, who have even worked on public holidays,” the plant has now reached its maximum capacity, says Wilfried Stenz, chairman of the works council. The company has had to turn down customer requests for more material. “Technically we cannot produce any more,” explains director Friedrich, thanking employees for their efforts: “We are going to celebrate this achievement in the right way, with all our families. And we are going to work hard to become even better.”
Roughly 700 thirty-wagon trains, each pulled by two locomotives, are needed to transport the required quantity of flat-rolled steel from the Ruhr to Andernach, where it is cold-rolled and coated with tin or chromium to form tinplate. More than three-quarters of Rasselstein’s production is exported, mainly to the enlarged European Union. Despite general stagnation on the markets, Rasselstein has posted remarkable volume growth in recent years while at the same time achieving adequate prices for its internationally regarded top-quality products.
