Record-​setting year for STEMMER IMAGING

Taking into account the difficult and unclear economic situation of summer 2010, the STEMMER IMAGING group in Europe set a cautiously optimistic target for the period up to June 2011. The actual turnover achieved in that period was more than 55 million Euros, corresponding to an increase of well above 50 percent compared to the previous year.

Unexpected Positive Development

Christof Zollitsch, Managing Director of the German parent company, attributes this unexpected positive development also to the economic trend in Germany, Europe and worldwide. He stresses however: “Being able to make use of a positive environment in the machine vision area is essential! We have substantially intensified our sales efforts during the critical period, finally allowing us to secure orders for many new projects and applications in various markets.“

Above-average Success

According to him, a major part of the company's above-​average success in all subsidiaries is due to the fact that STEMMER IMAGING kept its existing staff during the period of crisis in spite of the significant decline in sales and even expanded the staff team later. “Further investments made, for example, in our logistics centre, a new training centre and other new facilities as well as a well-​balanced purchasing and stock-​keeping strategy have put us in a position to benefit from the strong demand when the economic rebound started.”

Forecast for Financial Year 2011/12

Zollitsch does not believe that it will be possible to repeat or even continue this increase in the financial year 2011/12: "According to forecasts published by VDMA and other organisations, a stable growth is expected to continue and STEMMER IMAGING, being a major player in the machine vision market, should still highly benefit from this development. However, the number of new projects ordered by our customers last year will certainly not be reached again. For the new financial year, we have therefore set an ambitious but realistic sales target, based on the current market trend.”

Zollitsch states what has highest priority for 2011/12: “We want to make sure we fully meet the needs of our customers in all our subsidiaries. We will be able to achieve this goal with the expertise of our staff enabling us to provide efficient services and solutions and the most complete range of machine vision components in Europe."