Persuasive ambassador for the German machine tool industry Frankfurt am Main, 14 March 2011. – On 19 March 2011, Senator E.h. Dr.-Ing. E.h. Bernhard Kapp will be celebrating his 90th birthday. The entrepreneur nonpareil and grand seigneur of the German machine tool industry has in his long and successful career been an indefatigable and persuasive ambassador for the sector. Three attributes are perhaps the most apposite summaries of Bernhard Kapp’s manifold achievements over his long life: a mid-tier entrepreneur out of conviction, a technician out of passion, and an unswervingly committed advocate for the German mechanical engineering sector. The mid-tier companies are the backbone of the German economy. “It’s from there”, Kapp once said in an interview, “that we get a never-ending flow of new ideas, new solutions and new products, because we’re not interested in short-term success, we think and act in line with medium- and long-term goals.” Bernhard Kapp ran his own company on this principle for more than 50 years. For him, this included an exemplary personal commitment to entrepreneurial virtues in the best sense of the word. “We subscribe to principles that nowadays, unfortunately, would seem to be no longer generally accepted, like dependability, the sanctity of contracts, not promising more than you can perform, decency in dealing not only with the strong, but also with the weak”, he emphasised at his firm’s 50th anniversary. Bernhard Kapp has also continually prioritised responsible interpersonal relationships within the company, seeing these as a co-guarantor of success. “Supported by first-class staff, from the senior management to the unskilled labourer, all of them ready and willing to roll up their sleeves, lend a hand and feel themselves part of what we call the KAPP family, we have succeeded in creating an enterprise that in a highly sophisticated sector has for years now ranked among the world’s leaders in its chosen field”, relates Bernhard Kapp in recognition of a shared achievement. “Fast-tracking young high-flyers remains the most important investment you can make in your company’s future”. With this corporate philosophy, the first apprentices’ workshop was inaugurated shortly after the company had been founded. He has always been exceptionally interested in encouraging young people, both in their careers and in their commitment to the common good. Until recently, for example, he insisted on himself presenting the prizes he had endowed, e.g. for encouraging the next generation of engineers or the Dr. Kapp Role Model Prize. Numerous other activities and the accolades received in due recognition of them bear extensive witness to an undimmed enthusiasm for mentoring young people. The company’s success has validated his ethical code. Born in Stuttgart in 1921, after university and five years with the armed forces, Bernhard Kapp kick-started his career by joining the Waldrich company in Coburg as a design engineer. At the age of only 29, he became a partner in the firm, and its Managing Director. Over the course of 27 years, together with his brother-in-law Otto Waldrich he turned the company into a significant player on the global stage. In parallel to this, he set up his own machinery firm KAPP & CO. in Coburg in 1953. Nowadays, the KAPP Group employs around 800 people, and ranks among the world’s leading manufacturers of machine tools for hard and soft machining of toothing systems and profiles. Kapp’s innovation assured the survival of grinding machine manufacturers The KAPP Group owes its superlative position on the global market as a complete-system vendor to an idea from the passionate technician Bernhard Kapp, who in 1981 synergised entrepreneurial energy, inventive ingenuity and hands-on practice to bring about development of the first dressing-free profiled grinding disk with CBN technology. “With this innovation, Bernhard Kapp very possibly secured the survival of grinding machinery manufacturers in the face of competition from hard-machining”, is the verdict of long-standing companions today. With his passion for engineering and his intimate knowledge of the international markets, Bernhard Kapp very early on discerned the rising level of demand for specialised designs in the machine tool sector. His gift for achieving the technically conceivable with out-of-the-ordinary precision made him a coveted partner for industrial customers in the mechanical engineering, automotive, railroad, shipbuilding and aerospace sectors. The ability to meet the ultra stringent requirements of top-ranking companies is what has put Kapp ahead of its competitors, and helped to boost the “Made in Germany” image. Another building block for this corporate success was the international expansion of the group’s business operations. By the late 1960s, Kapp was already establishing intensive trading contacts with what were then the Eastern Bloc nations, chief among them the Soviet Union. At that time, exports to the Eastern Bloc accounted for more than 70 per cent of the total. Since the 1980s, a global network has been created, with the firm’s own facilities in the USA, Brazil, Japan and China. In 1997, the NILES Werkzeugmaschinen GmbH, which had been refounded in 1990 after the "7 October" nationalised machine tool cooperative had been wound up, was integrated into the Kapp Group. Bernhard Kapp’s advice was much in demand at other companies as well. Numerous firms and institutions, both at home and abroad, have appointed him to their administrative and supervisory boards, like Deutsche Messe- und Ausstellungs-AG, Gildemeister, Fiat, Krupp Hoesch, Iveco, Internazionale Holding Fiat, Werner & Pfleiderer, Trumpf, the Ifo Institute, the Fraunhofer Society and Coburg University. Highly regarded ambassador for Germany’s mechanical engineering sector Besides his successful career in the business world, Bernhard Kapp also made himself available for higher-order remits in the mechanical engineering sector and the German industrial segment as a whole. For 29 years, from 1971 to 1999, he headed the VDW (German Machine Tool Builders’ Association). For three years, from 1977 to 1980, he was President of the VDMA (German Engineering Federation). As�President, he twice represented the European umbrella organisation of the machine tool industry CECIMO. He was Vice-President of the BDI (Confederation of German Industry), but the German federal government also made use of his talents It appointed him, for example, as the sole representative of the German industrial sector in the mixed expert working group for machine tool manufacture on the commission set up by the Federal Republic of Germany and the USSR for economic and scientific-technical cooperation, where he was involved until 1992, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. All this reflects only a few facets of his honorary services. Bernhard Kapp has received numerous accolades at home and abroad for his indefatigable contributions.

Bernhard Kapp ranks among the great entrepreneurs who wrote the postwar history of the German mechanical engineering industry and helped to establish its global reputation. He has seen innumerable peaks and troughs of the business cycle, has experienced the adoption of NC technology in the mechanical engineering sector, the creation of the European common market, animated discussions on the benefits of technology, the rise of the Japanese as serious competitors, and finally the onset of globalisation. He has never lost his confidence in the performance capabilities of the German machine tool industry. To this very day, he remains convinced that it will master the challenges ahead with flying colours.