Around 200 participants gathered from around the world to celebrate Gebr Pfeiffer’s 150th anniversary in Kaiserslautern, Germany, on 8-9 May 2014. The family-owned company looked back from its early, rich history of steam engines and grinding mills at the heart of the Palatinate manufacturing base to today’s achievements, which include the production and commissioning of the largest vertical roller mill in Australia at Cement Australia’s Port Kembla plant and the largest such mill in the world for Holcim’s Barroso works in Brazil.
After a word of welcome by Gebr Pfeiffer’s General Manager Projects and Sales, Patrick Heyd, Executive Board member Gerold Keune glanced back at 150 years of Gebr Pfeiffer’s history, by first sketching a picture of the company’s founder, Jacob Pfeiffer, a keen promoter of technical innovation. It was the start of a company that would see the combination of high-quality German engineering and local manufacture to deliver state-of-the-art products such as separators and grinding mills to the world’s cement industry.
While France, Russia, England and the USA were part of its early geographical reach, today the company’s focus has shifted to Asia, Africa and the Americas, turning Gebr Pfeiffer into a truly global mill supplier. Projects such as the Port Kembla and Barroso mills demonstrate the firm’s international success.
