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CONFECTIONERY equipment specialist Theegarten-Pactec GmbH & Co. KG remains unaffected by the economic crisis. A comfortable inflow of new orders in 2009 indicates that the tendency amongst some confectionery producers to postpone new investment projects has not negatively impacted its books. Bucking the market trend, the company returned a 10% increase in sales, and registered another rise in new orders for the first quarter of the current financial year. The main application for its machines is the packaging of small pieced confectionery items, with the range organised in a matrix according to packaged items, packaging type and output range. The different performance categories are low speed up to 500 products/minute, medium speed up to 1000 products/minute and high speed for everything above. Processed products are categorised into three types: hard and preformed, cut and wrap, and chocolate. CEO Markus Rustler says company's aim is to continue to lead the market with an outstanding product for every type of packaging in every segment. "We are practically the only ones building continuous motion high-performance machines for different fields of application. For hard sugar articles such as boiled candies with a double twist wrap, we are capable of achieving outputs of up to 2300 products per minute. These machines are currently by far and away the fastest on the market," he notes. As the third generation to lead Theegarten-Pactec, Mr Rustler is conscious of the family legacy. "My motivation is the ambition to build on something which three generations before me have created over the last 76 years. This means maintaining a sharp competitive edge over our competitors and continuously pushing forward with added value for our customers," he says.
Export-orientated company
Having started out the year 2009 with comfortably padded order books, the crisis so far has largely passed the Dresden-based company. With exports dominating business (93% of sales in 2009) the focus of the company's sales activity is outside of Germany. "This has to do with the location of multinationals such as Nestlë, Wrigley, Cadbury and so on who do not produce in Germany on a large scale. And also, confectionery is produced in practically every country the world over," explains Mr Rustler.
The greatest growth rates continue to be registered in Russia and the Ukraine. With its 1994 takeover of Pactec, which evolved from the former East German state-run combine Nagema, the company enjoys traditionally good relations with Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states. In the growth market of China, with the assistance of the company's support centre in Shanghai, the Theegarten-Pactec team has already succeeded in securing ten confectionery manufacturers with potential requirement for the company's product range. "As far as confectionery is concerned, the Chinese market has not yet reached a sustainable level of development. Sweet food does not play much of a role in traditional 'We sell high-performance machines, not discount articles... but our prices are backed up by our significant technical edge' - Markus Rustler CEO, Theegarten-Pactec
Chinese cuisine, which tends to lean towards spicy, hot food. But China is still a growth market. There are currently around ten manufacturers of confectionery which offer a potential market for our products, and we are already doing business with them," Mr Rustler says. With demand for chewing gum, candies and chocolate on the increase in the India market, the company has stepped up its activity in the subcontinent. The same applies to Southeast Asia, notably in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.Leading technological position
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