F CASE STUDY
CASE STUDY
A history of innovation The origins of the Germany company Petkus go back to when young Christian Friedrich Röber opened his first forge in 1852.
F
rom the very beginning, Röber specialised in the manufacture of agricultural machinery, including malt cutters, choppers, beet cutters, ploughs, harrows and manual threshing machines. By 1874, the first factory was built alongside the river Erbstrom to take advantage of the free hydropower. The factory was soon converted to steam power, which remained the norm when Röber’s sons, Call and Rudolf, took over the business, and changed its name to CF Röber Söhne and began to specialise in the manufacture of seed and grain cleaning equipment. The company continued to thrive and grow over the following years, even managing to flourish in a period where the benefits
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to yield of seed cleaning were not fully appreciated by the marketplace.
The iron curtain years
During the turbulent post-war years with a divided Germany, Petkus Technologies proved to be so unique and exceptional that the company managed to survive difficult times and political chaos – from the expropriation following the Second World War to the privatisation following the reunification of Germany.
Reunification
In November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and the process of the reunification of the two Germanies began. And by 1994, Mark Scholze and Luca Celeghini decided to carry on the tradition of the international company’s prosperous formative decades