Lenze reports double-digit growth in its jubilee year

In its 75^th anniversary year, Lenze has successfully positioned itself in the market with new developments and collaborations, and achieved record results.

The Group’s revenue in the previous financial year grew by 21 percent to 832.6m euros. The automation specialist’s volume of orders grew by 50 percent to more than 1.1 billion euros. The operating result came to 91.8m euros and was also well over the previous year’s result (47.1m euros).

“Even in a turbulent market environment, automation will remain a winning sector in the coming years,” promises Lenze CEO Christian Wendler. “Industry must quickly boost its reduction of CO2 emissions. We are helping our customers to develop sustainable, energy-efficient production processes – with automation and digitalisation.

“In particular, because of increasing cost pressures and ever stricter environmental regulations, we are providing our partners in the small and medium-sized business sector with value-adding solutions, helped by smart data. Using our many years of expertise and our domain knowledge, we analyse and interpret their machine data and gain relevant insights for our customers. In this way we can precisely map out a machine’s energy needs and reduce energy consumption on average by up to 30 percent. Automation is the key to sustained success.”

Wendler notes other challenges industry is facing, and highlights solutions: “In addition to the growing pressure on industry worldwide with regard to emissions obligations, one of the biggest challenges for Lenze’s customers is the shortage of skilled personnel,” he says. “The shortage of trained personnel is a push-factor for automation projects, for example in the field of intralogistics. This is why companies all over the world are automating their storage and material-flow processes – and not only in commerce. The intralogistics sector is therefore a dynamic and strategically important field for Lenze.”

Success through collaboration

Lenze also supports machine and plant manufacturers in their search for new, digital business models, relying on a triad consisting of electrical engineering, software, and a platform strategy. “Today it is no longer enough just to sell hardware,” explains Wendler. “Together with our customers, we must work more closely with the operators to be able to reach a better understanding of processes and needs, and to develop business models based on that. Many smaller machine manufacturers cannot develop digital services themselves. Lenze helps them with the development and the implementation.”

To achieve this goal of developing business models and solutions in collaboration, Lenze is intensifying its cooperation with start-ups, suppliers, scientific institutes and customers. “We have to work together more closely and more agilely,” believes Wendler. In the 2021/2022 financial year, Lenze created forward-looking places for collaboration. One example is the Mechatronic Competence Campus (MCC) at the company’s Extertal site. “The MCC opened officially on 15 October 2022 and will be the heart of Lenze mechatronics,” says Wendler. “The aim is to bring all our expertise together in one place so as to speed up our development of drive solutions consisting of mechanics, electronics and software, which our customers need in order to succeed against the competition.”

The Digital Hub Industry in Bremen also has also been facilitating innovative forms of collaboration since summer 2022. Working there in close cooperation with the University of Bremen, Lenze offers small and medium-sized businesses an ecosystem for the open exchange of experiences and ideas and for experiments and collaborations. It is only in collaboration that beneficial digital services and business models can be created. “We believe that this requires courage and the readiness to change. It is no coincidence that ‘The Courage of Change’ is Lenze’s jubilee motto in 2022,” Wendler concludes.