The 2014 is a very important year for Schuler. The internationally press manufacturer is celebrating its 175th anniversary. The company was founded in 1839 by Louis Schuler as a metalworking shop in Göppingen’s Sauerbrunnengasse. The little workshop grew and became a global corporation with sales of almost 1.2 billion euros. Schuler will celebrate this occasion with a big event for employees and a special website that the main moments of its long tradition.
“There have been many milestones in Schuler’s success over the past 175 years,” says CEO Stefan Klebert, “and very few companies in Germany can look back on such a long and successful history.” A 175th company anniversary is rare: not even half of all German companies reach their 10th anniversary. To mark the occasion, Schuler’s celebrations will therefore include a central event for employees at its base in Göppingen, Germany, to be held in July. In addition, a special website (www.schulergroup175.com) presents 175 minor and major moments which have shaped Schuler over the years. Among them, there is the moment in 1852 when founder Louis Schuler – inspired by the Great Exhibition in London one year previously – decided to dedicate his future to the construction of machines for sheet metal processing. However, he himself could no longer witness his company’s own exhibit at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900: the world’s first transfer press. Over the following years, the company’s headcount grew to 1,000. With a car body press for Opel in 1924, Schuler began supplying the fledgling auto industry, which is still its most important customer today.
After the Second World War, Schuler was the first company in the American sector to receive an export license. The painstaking reconstruction work was rewarded: in 1961, sales reached 100 million deutschmarks, in 1970 they exceeded 200 million. At the same time, the company drove its internationalization with the foundation of subsidiaries in Brazil and North America, for example, followed by China and India in the 90s.
Meanwhile, Peugeot launched production on the first Crossbar Transfer press with suction-cup tooling – supplied by Schuler. Further innovations in recent years, such as Compact-Crossbar presses, ServoDirect (in the photo) and TwinServo technologies, have underlined Schuler’s leading position in the field of metalforming. This is also reflected by its business success: in 2012, the Schuler Group posted sales of more than one billion euros.
