voestalpine drives aerospace expansion

As one of the world’s leading suppliers to the aerospace industry, voestalpine is
consistently driving its growth in this technologically sophisticated future market. As recently as last December the Group agreed on a major EUR 40 million investment in a new high-tech forging line for the production of high-quality pre-materials for aircraft components.

Now a further EUR 30 million will go to the Kapfenberg site in Austria over the next two years, to finance a state-of-the-art production facility for aerostructures including highly stress-resistant engine mounts, wing and fuselage components, and landing gear parts. The fully automated facility is scheduled to commence operations as early as 2019.

With its pioneering technologies for the aerospace sector, the Special Steel Division is making a considerable contribution to achieving the voestalpine Group’s strategic target of raising the share of overall revenue generated in the growing mobility sector to 50 percent by 2020. voestalpine high-performance materials and advanced special forgings have become an indispensable part of models made by the major aircraft manufacturers, in particular Airbus and Boeing.

This latest EUR 30 million investment in a new production line at Group company Böhler Schmiedetechnik in Kapfenberg, Austria, is designed specifically to meet the growing demand for extremely high loadbearing, weight-saving structural parts in titanium and special steels which are used in aircraft construction.

“With an average annual growth rate of over three percent, the aerospace industry demonstrates a clear and continuing upward trend. In order to consistently extend our leading position in this technologically extremely challenging market, we are increasingly investing in development and ongoing improvements to the quality of our products and processes.

Investment in an additional state-of-the-art, fully automated production facility, which fully meets all Industry 4.0 parameters, marks an important step towards digital data collection throughout the entire manufacturing process for aerospace components at our site in Kapfenberg,” says Franz Rotter, Member of the Management Board of voestalpine AG and Head of the Special Steel Division.

The voestalpine Group currently generates around EUR 300 million in the aerospace customer segment, and this figure should increase to EUR 500 million over the medium term. The market forecasts are encouraging, with estimated global demand for more than 30,000 new aircraft over the next 15 years.