By Plasteurope.com staff

The downward trend in incoming orders for plastics and rubber machinery is continuing. Following a price-adjusted decline of 13% in 2022, the German engineering federation VDMA (Frankfurt; www.vdma.org) reported that machine manufacturers experienced a further 22% drop in their order books in 2023. Many companies are having to counteract this through short-time work, said Thorsten Kühmann, managing director of the plastics and rubber machinery division of VDMA.

The current year also remains challenging in terms of sales, Kühmann stressed, after a 13% price-adjusted increase had been achieved in sales in 2023 year-on-year due to the delivery of backlog orders. The hope is that the uncertainty in the markets will gradually dissipate midway through the year and interest rates will settle at a more tolerable level, thus boosting the willingness to invest in new machinery. More specifically, however, the VDMA expects sideways movement or slightly falling revenues for 2024.

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Ulrich Ackermann, managing director of VDMA foreign trade, drew attention to the impact of the “bipolar world order” in the European machinery industry. The globalisation of the world economy is increasingly coming under pressure. China is opting for autonomy with all the consequences that this entails for machinery manufacturing in Europe and, in the US over the past few years, President Joe Biden’s administration has maintained the “national approach” to trade policy adopted by the Trump government, said Ackermann. As far as machine manufacturers are concerned, this means they have to build up their own production facilities in major target markets; and a large number of plastics and rubber machinery manufacturers have already done so, Ackermann stressed. 

At the Plastics and Rubber Machinery Association’s annual general meeting at the start of June in Dresden, Germany, association chairman Ulrich Reifenhäuser, managing partner and CSO of plastics machinery manufacture Reifenhäuser (Troisdorf; www.reifenhauser.com/en), was confirmed in office. The following persons were additionally elected as board members for the next three years: Gerhard Böhm (Arburg), Jörg Bremer (KraussMaffei), Stefan Engleder (Engel), Sandra Füllsack (Motan Holding), Manfred Hackl (Erema), Thomas Holzer (Troester), Henning Stieglitz (Battenfeld-Cincinnati), Markus Vollmer (Kampf Schneid- und Wickeltechnik), Axel von Wiedersperg (Brückner), Sascha Witt (Windmöller & Hölscher), and Rainer Zimmermann (AZO).

— Translated by Plasteurope.com correspondent