4. Sounds as if you were someone who always forges on ahead. Is that also the reason why – as you already mentioned – you are such a big handball fan?
Quite possibly. Once the handball fever has grabbed you, the sport usually does not let go for the rest of your life. It’s the same for me. This sport is pure excitement – just like the work with PTFE. Unfortunately, my own active career as a handball player ended earlier than planned due to injury. But I was involved in the game for a long time as a youth trainer and passed on my experience. Because I am someone who enjoys working with people. I like the personal contact, also with customers, and I am always in close contact with our production team. Many of our customers have been with us for decades and constantly develop new, ambitious material solutions with us. When you have successfully cracked many hard nuts together, a special relationship develops – that’s true both in sport and at work.
5. Speaking of hard nuts to crack: One of the branches that Berghof Fluoroplastics does a lot of work for is the automotive branch. This branch is currently experiencing radical change in the shift towards e-mobility. Is that also a subject that you and your team deal with?
Absolutely, years ago, before everyone started talking about the subject, we enabled the development of a pressure compensation unit with emergency degassing function for batteries with our burstable, semi-permeable membrane made from our symmetrically porous PTFE Permeaflon® which, today, has proven itself in practice as an important safety feature in numerous e-vehicles. We have also based our quality management on the international IATF 16949:2016 standard and regularly have ourselves successfully certified. The word has got around with automotive suppliers and earned us many further exciting inquiries from this branch. We can already safely say: there will often be no getting round PTFE or a PTFE compound for the optimum material solution in e-mobility.
6. Working together with your team and customers on tricky, individual problems, adapting the production planning and logistics to further growth – as Technical Manager at Berghof Fluoroplastics you need a lot of energy. Are you also constantly “on the go” in your free time – or do you prefer to relax?
When I go to watch handball games, I get carried away by the excitement of course. Otherwise, my motto for my free time is rather: strength lies in staying calm. I enjoy being outdoors, skiing in winter or hiking with the family, for example. That’s one good thing the pandemic did for us by the way: We went hiking more than ever during that time, especially locally – and we discovered a lot of new, nearby beauty spots. We will definitely stick with these weekend trips, because, on these outdoor hikes, I often come up with the best ideas how our team can successfully solve the next complex challenge.