The change of leadership had been planned for a long time, but Uwe Arnold nevertheless relinquished the chairmanship of the board at a difficult time: At the beginning of the year, in the middle of the energy crisis, the long-standing head of Arnold AG in Friedrichsdorf withdrew from the operational business. The non-family board members Christoph Ebert and Ingo Stemmer took over the helm. On Thursday, Uwe Arnold was elected chairman of the supervisory board of the company founded by his grandfather Karl.
Barbara Schäder
Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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The metalworker Arnold became known beyond the country's borders through his collaboration with the artist Jeff Koons. In 1998, the company received its first order for a Koons sculpture, called "Balloon Flower". Since then, Arnold AG has implemented designs by a wide variety of artists. Just last week, R+V Insurance unveiled a sculpture entitled "Squaring the Circle" by the artist collective Troika, which was made by Arnold, on its campus in Wiesbaden.
So art projects remain part of the business. And there is "no turning point" in other respects either, says the new co-managing director Stemmer. His father Dieter Stemmer used to form a management duo together with Uwe Arnold.
Sweat-inducing energy prices
Stemmer junior and Ebert joined the Executive Board in 2013 and have both been with the company for 20 years. But even though the final handover of Arnold to the two younger managers went smoothly, a lot has changed at Arnold AG in the past 15 months.
The much-cited turning point that swept across Europe with the Russian attack on Ukraine was also clearly noticeable here. "When the price of electricity on the spot market temporarily rose to 70 cents per kilowatt hour in the summer, beads of sweat stood on our foreheads," says Stemmer.
After all, the processing and painting of metal eats up a lot of energy. On top of that, the prices of stainless steel, Arnold's most important material, also rose. Overall, production costs are now around 20 percent higher than in 2019, says Ebert. After all, some of the price increases were passed on to customers – after arduous negotiations. "It went so far that we showed our customers individual receipts so that they could see what our costs were."
Custom-made products and series production
The long-standing relationships with many customers who purchase very special products from Arnold have helped the Hessians: In addition to the works of art, most of which are manufactured in a factory in Thuringia, Arnold produces railings, windbreaks and doors for luxury yachts. The company is also involved in the production of baggage scanners for airports by manufacturing lead components to protect against X-rays.
In the production hall at the Friedrichsdorf headquarters, however, simple sheet metal can also be seen, which are punched, bent and assembled into metal housings, for example for medical technology devices. The broad positioning proved to be stabilizing during the Corona pandemic. With the travel restrictions, the demand for airport scanners collapsed, but medical technology companies ordered all the more housings for analytical devices for corona tests.
Nevertheless, the pandemic did not leave Arnold AG unscathed: In a statement to the Annual General Meeting on Thursday, there is talk of a "very difficult year 2021", from which the company recovered last year. Sales reached around 2022 million euros in 60. The company, which is an AG but not listed on the stock exchange, does not make any public statements about profits. Apart from the members of the owner family, which owns 85 percent of the shares, only employees are allowed to acquire Arnold shares. There are currently 73 shareholders in total.
Training is a top priority
About half of the turnover is generated with industrial customers, the other half is accounted for by the art and yacht business, says Stemmer. A glance at the Arnold website gives the impression that the company has not equipped a ship since 2016 – because the last yacht listed there as a reference dates from this year. However, this is only due to the fact that buyers of luxury yachts attach great importance to discretion, says Stemmer. In fact, business continues, even if a market has disappeared with the Ukraine war and the sanctions against Russian oligarchs. "I think that the number of billionaires in the world has not decreased."
Among other things, Arnold has also purchased 3D printers for the production of tailor-made components for yachts. From the outside, they look like two huge cubes with an edge length of about four meters. Inside, a welding torch layers thin metal beads on top of each other, which can be joined together to form any shape.
Especially for the works of art, however, a lot of manual work is still done. "We are the right people who don't just press a button on the machine, but want to design something," says Ebert. An argument that also helps in the search for trainees – there are currently around 30. With a good 400 employees, this is a high rate, with an average of only five trainees per 100 employees in the metal and electrical industry.