Dear reader,

Writing this editorial always brings me great pleasure because it always features interesting people.

If there is one businessman I wish I could have met, it would be Henri Levy from the Alsace region in France. He took over a locksmith’s workshop in Rorschach in 1897 and his company started, with only a few employees, designing and constructing its own textile machines for the renowned hand embroideries of the Swiss Canton of St.Gallen. In this specific article, you can read about how his workshop survived the crisis in the textile industry by switching to machine tools. The naturalised Swiss citizen would certainly be proud of today’s international Starrag Group which, in 2022, can look back on 125 years of turbulence and innovation.

In July, over 200 people attended the Aerospace Technology Days event. Together with ZEISS, we invited experts from the aerospace and energy industries to the event at Lake Constance. In addition to the many technical presentations, I was particularly fascinated by our guest speaker, Claude Nicollier, the only Swiss astronaut to date to have gone to space four times.

However, back on earth, we have exciting projects going on, as demonstrated by a meeting at our plant in Bielefeld. Henning Albrechtsen met with Hubert Erz, a senior consultant for sales in renewables, with whom the HACO Managing Director has worked in close collaboration for a number of years. Once again, they are working together, this time to construct two gigantic Droop+Rein portal machines which the Danish family-owned company will use to manufacture enormous rotor housings for wind power plants.