Founded in 1985 in Brescia, Gimatic from Roncadelle (Bs), Italy, has developed into a global supplier of pneumatic and mechatronic components that today employs 250 people worldwide. The Gimatic Group has a network of 17 subsidiaries worldwide. The newest subsidiary in Romania has just opened in June 2018. Two more are planned for 2018: the Russian branch opened on June 15 and an Indian branch is due to open in July.

With a turnover of 48 million euros, the company achieved growth of around 20 percent in 2017. Gimatic invests more than ten percent of its annual turnover in research and development, both internally and externally in collaboration with universities and research institutes such as the Fraunhofer Institute. This has already resulted in more than 180 patents in Italy, Germany, the USA, Japan and China. In June 2016, Gimatic was acquired by the Chinese private equity fund Agic, whose focus is on growth in Asia. Since then, sales in Asia have increased, new sales offices have been set up and new employees have been hired.

Industry 4.0 in Rocandelle

Gimatic has a state-of-the-art production facility in Rocandelle in line with Industry 4.0: every assembly station or milling machine in the assembly department and mechanical production are connected to the ERP. There is no more paper, no more operating instructions, but the latest version is always available for each product. This eliminates errors. The assembly steps are precisely defined and key figures are recorded over time to show how things are going and where, so that you can react quickly with process optimization if necessary. This information is available to everyone involved on the intranet.

Becoming the best supplier of EOAT solutions and technology leader is the vision and the company is on the right track, according to the company. Gimatic has consistently achieved double-digit growth since 2009, and the turnover forecast for 2018 is around 53 million euros. The global team is set to grow by a further 25 employees by 2019. The number of global branches is set to increase to 23 by 2019. In future, Gimatic will focus on improving collaborative robotics. The second generation of mechatronic servo grippers is also planned. IO-Link boxes, RFID with web service for geolocalization, supercapacitor boxes with Wi-Fi control for complete wireless gripper control, new parallel grippers and collaboration kits for cobots: these are the developments that the engineers are currently working on. as