Always maintaining the flexibility to change

And what about the in­ter­na­tion­al­iza­tion of the company?

Schwarzkopf: To­day, hotset has a glob­al pres­ence — among oth­er things through for­eign sub­sidiaries with their own as­sem­bly plants. Soon af­ter the com­pa­ny was found­ed, my fa­ther es­tab­lished the first agen­cies in Spain, France and Scan­di­navia. At the be­gin­ning of the 1980s, the Hotset Cor­po­ra­tion was found­ed in the USA, fol­lowed by branch­es in Asia, New Zealand, Aus­tria, Turkey, South Amer­i­ca and In­dia. In­ter­na­tion­al­iza­tion was giv­en a strong boost in 2001 with the es­tab­lish­ment of our plant in Mal­ta and in 2010 with the launch of the in­de­pen­dent Hotset Amer­i­ca Cor­po­ra­tion. 2014 saw the es­tab­lish­ment of HIPL In­dia Pvt Ltd, which man­u­fac­tures our heat­ing ca­bles. The Mal­ta plant has since moved to larg­er build­ings and has been an EU En­er­gy Ef­fi­cien­cy Part­ner since 2016.

You took over the man­age­ment of the com­pa­ny from your fa­ther at the turn of the year 2001…

Schwarzkopf: …right, that was an event­ful time. We al­ready had over 100 em­ploy­ees in spi­ral car­tridge pro­duc­tion alone, and the de­vel­op­ment of the hot­flex for heat­ing 3D molds and new con­trol equip­ment was al­ready in full swing. Short­ly there­after, we ex­pand­ed Mal­ta and put our cur­rent main plant in Hueck­straße in Lü­den­scheid in­to operation.

How did the gen­er­a­tion change take place at the top of the company?

Schwarzkopf: There were a few dis­putes be­tween fa­ther and son, but in con­trast to oth­er com­pa­nies, the tran­si­tion from the first gen­er­a­tion of founders to the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion of boss­es was quite suc­cess­ful for us. Es­pe­cial­ly since the flow pro­duc­tion for the HHP and LHT car­tridge heaters in­tro­duced un­der my fa­ther and a mod­ern PPS sys­tem en­sured high pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and avail­abil­i­ty. In ad­di­tion, our de­vel­op­ers were able to im­ple­ment fur­ther in­no­va­tions year af­ter year — for ex­am­ple, new hot­spring vari­ants, new hot­con­trol con­trol units, or even new hot­cast gat­ing noz­zles for mag­ne­sium die cast­ing. All these so­lu­tions are still part of our port­fo­lio to­day and have set stan­dards in the in­dus­try in many places. From the very be­gin­ning, my pri­ma­ry goals were to strength­en the in­no­v­a­tive pow­er of the com­pa­ny, to fur­ther in­crease our qual­i­ty lev­el, to ex­pand hotset’s en­gi­neer­ing com­pe­ten­cies, and to push ahead with internationalization.

What com­pet­i­tive strengths would you cur­rent­ly at­tribute to hotset?

Schwarzkopf: As a man­u­fac­tur­er of com­po­nents for in­dus­tri­al heat­ing tech­nol­o­gy — here we are talk­ing about tem­per­a­ture con­trol chan­nels, heat­ing el­e­ments, re­sis­tance ther­mome­ters and ther­mo­cou­ples, for ex­am­ple — we score points with a large se­lec­tion of qual­i­ty prod­ucts for many ar­eas of ap­pli­ca­tion. As a de­vel­op­er of flex­i­ble sys­tem so­lu­tions, we of­fer a grow­ing range of in­no­v­a­tive and en­er­gy-sav­ing process so­lu­tions with the P‑System heat­ing plates, the D‑System da­ta log­ger and the DH-Sys­tem for the high­ly dy­nam­ic tem­per­a­ture con­trol of in­jec­tion molds. And in the project busi­ness, we take over en­tire val­ue chains for our cus­tomers ¬- such as con­trol cab­i­net as­sem­bly. From a tech­no­log­i­cal point of view, we have po­si­tioned our­selves strong­ly, and in our de­vel­op­ment work we can con­vince with high in­no­v­a­tive strength and short in­no­va­tion cycles.