Blowmolding: Bekum big-machine business files bankruptcy

According to a local news report in Austrian newspaper Der Standard, 84 employees will be affected, as will about 184 companies to whom the Austrian business unit owes a total of about €5 million. Although Bekum’s managing and marketing directors both were unavailable this week, another employee, Andreas Mehnert, sales manager and son of company owner and founder Gottfried Mehnert, confirmed the numbers in the newspaper were correct. According to Austrian law, a bankruptcy attorney will be assigned to determine if the operation can be saved.

Since 1968, Bekum’s plant in Austria has been the company’s center of expertise for design and manufacturing of large extrusion blowmolding machinery, such as those used for processing of automotive fuel tanks, intermediate bulk containers, and drums.

According to the bankruptcy filing, the company has not sold a large machine since last summer, and early this year placed its remaining employees in Austria on limited hours. In the best of times Bekum employed as many as 300 in Traismauer.

Sales of large blowmolding machines have been down for many years, as indicated in sales statistics kept by the trade groups SPI in the U.S. and Euromap in Europe. But calls to one of the Bekum’s top competitors, Kautex (Bonn, Germany), indicate all is not lost for the blowmolded fuel tank market, with Marlene Fontaine, marketing manager at Kautex, saying the company has sold 12 machines for fuel tanks or other large automotive fuel system components in the past 11 months to customers in Asia and Europe.

One active customer is China’s Yapp, which is installing Kautex blowmolding units at new facilities in Russia and India for blowmolding of fuel tanks. “Our plant in full of machines (in various stages of manufacture) for fuel tanks,” she said. —[email protected]