Hansa Flex

History

Joachim Armerding (1935–2015) founded the company in 1962 as a one-man operation in Achim near Bremen. Under the company name Joachim Armerding Industriebedarf, he specialised at first in the bespoke assembly of hose lines and established himself in the growing market for hydraulic hoses.

In 1965, Armerding moved premises to a former plumber's workshop in Bremen and took on his first employee. In 1969, Günter Buschmann – Armerding's long-time work colleague and friend – became a partner in the company. He ran the second branch in Osnabrück. In the same year, the company changed its name to Hansa-Flex. Further people joined the company as partners in 70s and 80s.

By the end of 1988, the number of branches came to 21. In 1989, the company opened its first branch outside Germany in Elst, the Netherlands. Following reunification with the GDR and the political collapse in eastern Europe, Hansa-Flex established itself in the new German federal states as well as in Poland and the Czech Republic. In 1990, around 250 employees worked for the company, and the annual revenue was around DM 50 million.

In 1995, Thomas Armerding and Uwe Buschmann, the sons of the company founders, joined the management of Hansa-Flex and gradually took over the business. The first branch outside Europe was opened in 1997 in İskenderun, Turkey, followed in 1999 by branches in Billings, United States and in Blumenau, Brazil, the first on the American continents.

In 1998, the company began to expand the spare parts business by becoming a system provider in the hydraulics field. For this, a pipe bending plant was built in Schönebeck in Saxony-Anhalt. The facilities for cylinder repair (in Königshofen, Thüringen), sealing technology (in Eisenberg, Thüringen) and hydraulic components (in Dresden, Saxony) followed in 2001. The Engineering and Plant Construction division started the design and manufacture of complex hydraulic units in 2003.

The spare parts division was expanded in 2001 by the introduction of a mobile Rapid Hydraulic Service to provide immediate assistance on site when a machine breaks down. The introduction of an alphanumeric code that covers all the product features of hydraulic connection components (X-Code) has since then speeded up the assembly of replacements for defective hoses and improved the error robustness of the ordering process. In 2012, the company concentrated its series hose manufacturing activities at Bremen. Before that the work had been split between different branches.

In 2010, the legal structure of the company was changed from a GmbH to an Aktiengesellschaft, as this would be to the benefit of the organisation – as a result Hansa-Flex Hydraulik GmbH became Hansa-Flex AG. The shares of the non-publicly listed AG have remained with the founder families since then.

In business year 2011, the company achieved a revenue of over €300 million. At the beginning of 2012, the number of employees rose to above 3,000, of which 1,750 were working in Germany and more than 1,250 in the international businesses.

On 31 December 2014, Hansa-Flex had over 383 subsidiaries worldwide in 36 countries and a consolidated group revenue of €359 million.

Business profile

As of February 2015, Hansa-Flex is represented worldwide by 399 subsidiaries. Of the European subsidiaries, 327 are located in EU countries and 210 are in Germany. The company headquarters are in Bremen.

In the business fields of hydraulics and pneumatics, Hansa-Flex is presently (2015) divided into the following divisions, which are organised around the most important products and solutions: Pipelines and Special Fittings, Mobile Service, Industrial Service, Engineering and Plant Construction, Cylinder Repair and Sealing Technology.

The revenue of the company is distributed – in descending order – across the following product groups and services: hose lines; hoses, hose technology and accessories; threaded connectors and adapters; services; couplings and ball valves; hydraulic components; metal hoses; pipes and pipelines; plant construction; miscellaneous activities such as sealing technology etc. (in 2015).

According to its records, Hansa-Flex has over 200,000 companies as customers all over the world. They come mainly from the construction industry, mechanical engineering, plant engineering and automotive engineering.

Awards and social commitment

In 1990, the company founder, Joachim Armerding, was named Entrepreneur of the Year for his life's work by the German Association of Independent Businessmen (ASU) and the Federation of Young Entrepreneurs (BJU).

In December 2012, Joachim Armerding established the Hansa-Flex Foundation. This was started with an endowment of €1 million and operates in the field of education and training. Among other things, it provides stipends to support students at the Jacobs University Bremen.

Publications

In addition to a regularly published German-English customer magazine, the company has also published two reference books: