The weather at the Arctic Circle is inhospitable. In winter it is bitterly cold there. Such conditions pose challenges for people and machines – including electric locomotives, which will be used to transport iron ore under difficult conditions in Sweden in the future. The locomotives have a system that saves energy during braking. To achieve this, cables and connectors would have to be particularly robust, says Matthias Lapp, CEO of the Stuttgart-based Lapp Group. The family-owned company sees great opportunities in railway technology and has been expanding this area for years. The market potential for such connection solutions alone is 500 million euros per year.
With around 40,000 products, Lapp is one of the most important manufacturers and suppliers of fastening technology. It produces, among other things, connection and control cables, data cables, fiber optic cables, cable glands, industrial connectors. The main customers are mechanical and plant engineering, the food industry, the energy sector and the mobility sector. There, Lapp is benefiting from the trend towards electric drives. "Every electric car needs a charging cable," says the managing partner.
"Not in the car, but on the socket of the vehicle"
For more than ten years, the company has been producing and developing charging cables for corresponding vehicles – including for Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, and recently also for Toyota. The company boss is particularly proud of this last order. His company also sells adapters that ensure that the vehicle can also be charged at a normal household socket in an emergency. Then, of course, the charging process will take longer. Here, the medium-sized company has opened up new customers, namely end customers who buy second cables from Amazon and Co.
In order to cope with the demand, a new production facility for the final assembly of charging cables and plugs has just been built in the Czech Republic. Lapp has focused on charging solutions. "It's a completely different environment. We're not in the car, we're at the socket of the vehicle." This means that the cable specialist does not have to deal with the problems of traditional automotive suppliers in the course of restructuring the industry. Lapp is an example of how a traditional company can be at the forefront here.
Direct current instead of alternating current
The new mobility often goes hand in hand with electricity from renewable energies. Photovoltaics, for example. The sun's energy generates direct current. And this is where Lapp comes into play – as the developer of a corresponding cable and a proponent of direct current instead of the alternating current that is common today and is used in the household. Matthias Lapp says that direct current has a decisive advantage: it eliminates the losses that occur today when converting direct current into alternating current and vice versa. Pioneers in this field are the data centers. More and more of the energy-intensive data centers are getting their electricity from renewable energies and have therefore converted to direct current grids. In industry, on the other hand, there are only niche applications for direct current. For this reason, the Swabians and other partners of an initiative are in favour of focusing more on the topic in industrial production. Whether this will succeed in the foreseeable future remains to be seen.