Industry
07.07.2019
Leitner, crowd-moving innovation
A multinational company with its heart in South Tyrol
Moving people. Vertically or horizontally, whether flying over seas or climbing snowy peaks. All around the world. There is no continent that does not feature the lifts, cable cars, underground railways or people movers of the Leitner Group, a multinational company whose heart has been beating, for 130 years, in Vipiteno, South Tyrol. And yet, 2018 was an especially important year for the company, marking as it did the moment the group exceeded one billion Euro in turnover. This important milestone was celebrated in true Leitner style, with President Anton Seeber gathering all the company’s collaborators to make the announcement. 2017 had closed at 873 million Euro, and the following year’s 16% growth allowed the Group to surpass the long coveted threshold – to be precise, one billion and twenty-one million Euro.
From cableway installations to wind plants
This was an important figure for the worldwide leader in cableway installations (Leitner Ropeways and Poma), in snow groomers and tracked utility vehicles (Prinoth), in snowmaking machines (Demaclenko) and in wind turbines (Leitwind).
“We are extremely proud of this result,” commented Anton Seeber, “and yet, with all due humility and keeping our feet firmly on the ground, it is worth noting that other factors, in addition to turnover, also confirm the company’s health and sustainable growth. To have grown considerably is not just our turnover, but also the investments poured into research and development (24.4 million Euro) and into capital goods (24.8 million), as well as the number of collaborators who work with us (3,500).”
Other figures worth mentioning are the Group’s 11 production sites, 65 subsidiaries and 132 service centres spread across different continents. Particularly significant are the hundred or so cableway installations built in 2018 by Leitner Ropeways and Poma, and two iconic projects in particular: the lift on the Kleine Matterhorn, having the highest top station in Europe at an altitude of 4,000 meters, and the Caribbean’s first urban cable car system, in Santo Domingo.
Toward the Alpine World Ski Championships in Cortina
2018 was a memorable year for Leitner, but 2019 promises to be just as successful, with prestigious projects such as those in Voss, Norway (Scandinavia’s first tricable ropeway), in Zuhai, China (three interconnected tricables), and in Medellin, Colombia (the city’s newly inaugurated sixth urban cable car line), as well as the commencement of works on the Alpine Crossing, a cable car providing a link between the Swiss and Italian side of the Matterhorn.
Prinoth has also been enjoying considerable growth, both in terms of snow groomers (as technical partner of the World Ski Championships in Äre and Seefeld, of the upcoming Alpine World Ski Championships in Cortina and of the Beijing Olympics) and, increasingly, in terms of multipurpose tracked utility vehicles, particularly overseas, and of other tracked machinery designed for vegetation management, manufactured in the Group’s German production site. In the meantime, an incline lift has just been inaugurated in Finland’s ancient city of Turku, 2011 European Capital of Culture, which connects the city with the Kakolanmäki Hill. The project, of course, bears the name of Leitner, the company that has been moving people for the past 130 years.
