Ternitz a change of ownership took place in the Starlinger Group within a family. The Starlinger Group was restructured and thereby since then Maplan GmbH has been owned by the Soulier family that had previously held senior positions within the Starlinger Group. With their experience in machine construction business, this new owner wants to expand Maplan significantly. Starlinger will continue to be a co-partner of Maplan.

In 2012, the company achieved a turnover of 36 million euros. The aim was to expand significantly by upgrading sales, service and market presence in many countries in order to operate closer to the customers. These efforts are bearing fruit: In 2013, Maplan has 60 sales and service locations worldwide.

New Strategic Orientation
The new strategic orientation is basically defined by four strategic approaches:
1. Investing in specialists
2. Strengthening sales and service structure
3. Concentration on core business and
4. Expanding manufacturing and development capabilities.

Strengthening Staff
In 2013 the management was expanded in order to promote the success of Maplan worldwide even faster and more targeted. The result is a double leadership with Leopold Heidegger as CFO for the entire financial sector and Wolfgang Meyer as CEO on the operative side in sales, development and production. It has invested in specialists in many important fields of the company. New experts in the fields of mechanical design, production management and purchasing have strengthened the Team in Ternitz.

Strengthening Core Business
With this new team, there is a unique, new strategic orientation with a focus on core business, that is, rubber injection moulding. Maplan stands for commitment to quality and highly practicality-oriented solutions. Maplan will use this reputation and concentrate all our resources in the areas of innovation, reliability and customer service in order to offer our existing clients or the entire rubber injection moulding market energy efficient and optimized Maplan machine concepts even faster and more effectively.

Investing in the Structure
As already mentioned, in recent years we have done much preliminary work on the development of new markets. Already in 2013, these investments in the structure start to show first positive effects. The fast-growing markets such as Turkey, India, China, Brazil ... just to name a few, are among the priorities that will be pushed massively. At the same time, Maplan will also intensively modify and expand its traditional "old" priority markets. The goal is to provide an even better service to customers in Europe and USA in the next few years. These markets stand for requirements that are technically demanding and are therefore central to Maplan’s current and future performance in development and innovation.

Expansion of Production Capacities
Due to vibrant demands worldwide, our capacities so far have been stretched to the limit. Therefore, Maplan will open a new production site which will in the first step roughly double production capacities. This switching of position incidentally allows for an optimization of the entire production process which enables a lean, fast and cost-effective production of machines. The new site will be located in Austria. The expertise of our employees, combined with optimal global processes and today's global purchasing, will make it possible to produce machines in Austria which are very good technically and competitive in terms of cost. Wolfgang Meyer commented: "Quality Made in Austria is what has made us strong - and this will remain a key factor in the future."