Title
Interview
Interview
Martin
Ziehbrunner,
Essemtec AG
The past 8 years have seen virtually meteoric growth for the small,
Swiss-based company Essemtec AG. From small beginnings as
manufacturers of manual and semi-automatic pick and
place equipment to a global provider of turnkey
solutions, the company has overtaken many of its
smaller competitors on the way up and is a
constant thorn in the side of many of the larger
multi-national corporations.
Trevor Galbraith met Essemtec’s energetic
managing director, Martin Ziehbrunner, to find
out the secrets behind the Essemtec magic.
Martin, Essemtec is a second-generation automatic pick and place systems, and In the year 2000, we needed more
company, and this is your fifth expansion. we started to develop small turnkey lines space and took over a building in Aesch,
Tell me a little about your beginnings and together with dispensers, printers and close to Luzern. This was a lucky decision
where Essemtec came from? ovens. Everything we gained was reinvested, as we had enough land capacity to enhance
and after seven years we had built a good the buildings in five steps to today’s size.
Initially it started with an idea of my father. distribution network as well as a complete Additionally, branches in Germany, USA
He was working at a Swiss distributor for product range for prototyping productions. and India were established supporting our
electronic production equipment and saw During that time many customers current world wide distribution structure
SMT coming up on a larger scale. It started grew out of small batches and asked us for and local service.
end of the 80’s, together with an old friend higher automated systems. Therefore we
of his, as he felt to have some part time job started to develop our first fully automatic Most major pick and place manufactur-
also after his retirement, which was coming pick and place system, which entered the ers are moving towards the mid-range
up in 1992. After one to two years of doing market in 1999. segment as job sizes get smaller and the
it on a very low scale, the decision had to We were able to fill a market niche by number of changeovers increase. Essemtec
be taken either to do on a professional providing a lower cost, fully flexible pick are going in the opposite direction with
level or stop it completely. At that time I and place system which already had at that the introduction of your FLX series.
was working for IBM and was responsible time our intelligent feeder concept, the Are you aiming to provide high volume
for new product introductions in Austria wide range of possible components as well solutions, or is the goal to improve your
and Switzerland. Over a few months he as a fully graphical user interface, which functionality in the high speed, high mix
started to convince me to join him. Initially was at that time something new. Being at environment?
I had no big interest, but after visiting a few that time a staff of less then 10 people,
shows, I saw a good potential. Essemtec was we grew over the last years to more than With nearly 1000 pick and place systems
founded in 1991, and after fulfilling my du- 110 people. Today more then a third of installed world wide, many of our custom-
ties with IBM, I joined in 1992 as employee the staff is working in developing, making ers are desiring systems which provide
number two…. sure that we can grow in all four segments the same highly flexible, multifunctional
We slowly, due to the lack of capital, (printers, dispensers, pick and place, ovens) approach as today’s FLX range of machines,
started to develop newer machines. The continuously and bring out new innovative but with higher speed. We are following
manual systems were followed by semi- products to the market. this demand by offering today systems
32 – Global SMT & Packaging – September 2008
www.globalsmt.net
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