All stirred up

This spring, several manufacturers have promptly presented new face-mix mixers. Visitors to the Bauma trade fair in Munich had a chance to look into the trough of the Rotoconix at the Skako stand. At the Pemat stand, the PMPM Multimix with its elegant black design drew curious looks. And the VM 500 from Haarup was impressive with its many innovations. Masa had presented a mixer with an inclined container already in January at the Precast Show in Indianapolis in the USA.

The competitors showed themselves emphatically unimpressed. “A Porsche cannot be copied as easily as that,” as some of them drew comparison to the automobile industry. In other words: their own mixers are packed with know-how, are established on the market, and are much in demand. The newcomer mixers will first have to prove their special qualities.

That is true. At least for now. But the competitors cannot sit back and relax. Because at least some of the companies mentioned above made no bones about their objective: especially now, given the saturated markets in Western Europe and in the USA – with some business relationships between a concrete plant and a particular mixer manufacturer extending back for decades – one’s own market share with the customary product pallet would be difficult to extend. With face-mix mixers, the named companies intend to make an offer to “precast plants amendable to change” and snatch market shares from their competitors. Much like, for example, what Mercedes-Benz once did when it developed the A-Class as a first step to lure away customers from the competition and then, in a second and third step, enthuse them for the higher-quality models of the B- and C-Classes.