‘Anyone who talks about future is all the more credible, if he also takes account of reality,' is what you have said at the beginning of the Symposium. Indeed, the approach behind the Symposium has been quite future-oriented and at the same time it is grounded in reality. What key future trends have emerged at Thun this year and how will the United Grinding Group leverage on the same?

This is a really good but broad question. Finally our approach and target is, helping our customers to be more successful. For being successful I believe that we need more than only a perfect machine. For many customers it's really crucial that we have next to them skilled and experienced Customer Care technicians for quick and competent help. This trend will be more and more important. United Grinding has the target that we will be with our more than 2,300 employees and representatives in all relevant markets close to the customer.

Furthermore, I think with PuLs (Precision and Passion; our company philosophy) we're working on an ‘internal' topic which in future will be even interesting for our customers: E.g. giving answers to the question, how you can avoid waste for being more efficient and finally successful. Here we're working on concrete things as mentioned at the press conference. We trained a huge amount of our employees to the PuLs-philosophy during the last months.

Future means asking today the right questions, developing tomorrow the right solutions for finally being ready the day after tomorrow for helping our customers. Therefore we're investing every year a significant amount of our sales in R&D - year per year per year. In many fields - e.g. lasering, as showed at the Symposium - we are investing and working on basic researches (close with universities) for being at the top of innovation.

As a member of the Körber Group we have some more advantages. On this level we have teams working thinking about what can be the next big trends and how we will face it.