Stuttgart/Munich The Stuttgart plant manufacturer Exyte is preparing for a long-lasting boom. “In 2027 there will be ten billion euros in sales,” said CEO Wolfgang Büchele to the Handelsblatt. “That would be a doubling of 2021.”
Exyte is benefiting from the fact that the chip companies are spending billions on new plants worldwide in the face of dramatic supply bottlenecks. Büchele explained that 2022 got off to an excellent start: “In the first two months of the year, incoming orders were well above our expectations.”
The Swabians see themselves as a leading provider for the planning, development and construction of high-tech systems, especially chip factories. According to Exyte, it booked orders worth a good eight billion euros last year, more than twice as much as in 2020. The company generates more than 80 percent of its sales with the semiconductor industry. The group earns the rest with data centers and the pharmaceutical industry.
The prospects for its main customers, i.e. the chip manufacturers, are bright. The consulting firm McKinsey estimates that sales in the chip industry will increase by up to eight percent every year up to 2030. As a result, worldwide revenues would climb from a good 600 billion dollars to more than one trillion dollars.
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Dozens of new plants are needed to meet this demand. In Europe alone, production capacity must quadruple if the EU wants to achieve the goal it has set itself: Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wants to increase Europe’s share of global production from 10 to 20 percent.
Exyte has already achieved sales targets for 2025
“Megatrends such as working from home, the growth of artificial intelligence and the increasing demand for electric cars mean that the demand for semiconductors will also increase sharply,” says Ondrej Burkacky, chip expert at McKinsey.
“For us, the chip volume is crucial,” says CEO Büchele. “It has grown steadily over the past 30 years. Now it’s growing exponentially. I’m not worried until 2030 and actually not beyond that either.”
Exyte’s sales have almost doubled since he took office five years ago. According to Büchele, he originally aimed for a turnover of five billion by 2025. The company almost achieved this goal by 2021. The fact that Exyte fell slightly short is due to delays on the construction sites caused by the corona pandemic. “This year we will substantially exceed this mark,” says Büchele.
In order to cope with the flood of orders, the 62-year-old now has to recruit masses of new people. “We have a substantial need for personnel and want to hire between 1,500 and 2,000 additional employees this year,” says Büchele. Exyte currently has 7,500 employees.
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For months, the chip industry has not been able to keep up with the orders – and is therefore planning new factories around the world. Intel announced in February that it would invest 17 billion euros in two plants in Magdeburg. In addition, 4.5 billion are to flow into a location for further processing of the components in Italy.
The Americans are regular customers of Exyte, even if the Stuttgart company does not comment on the cooperation with the second largest chip manufacturer in the world. Exyte is currently expanding Intel’s factories in Ireland. There are more orders on the island: Intel boss Pat Gelsinger wants to spend an additional twelve billion euros at the Leixlip site in the next few years. Intel is also investing in the US state of Ohio and Malaysia.
That’s not all: Germany’s leading chip manufacturer, Infineon, has decided to build a new factory in Malaysia for two billion euros. For the Munich company, Exyte recently built a plant in Villach, Austria – and completed it three months earlier than planned last summer.
Singapore plays a special role for Exyte
Exyte is currently particularly active in Singapore: In the city-state, the group is building a factory for the Munich-based wafer manufacturer Siltronic, among other things. Wafers are slices of silicon from which chips are made. In addition, Exyte works in Singapore for the memory chip producer Micron and the contract manufacturer Globalfoundries.
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The best-known project in Germany is a battery factory by the Chinese manufacturer CATL in Thuringia. In China, Exyte also employs 700 people who set up factories for local customers. Exyte usually books between 20 and 25 percent of the total investment sum for itself.
The name is still hardly known to the public, but Exyte has a long tradition: the company, founded in 1912 by Karl Meissner and Paul Wurst, is one of the pioneers of clean room technology. In the past 30 years, however, the owners have changed frequently, and the CEOs even more frequently. The company has belonged to the Austrian Georg Stumpf since 2009.
Exyte is currently working for the wafer manufacturer Siltronic in Freiberg, Saxony, and in Singapore.
(Photo: Paul Schmidt/ Siltronic)
In March 2017, Büchele, who holds a doctorate in chemistry, became head of the M+W Group, which was renamed Exyte shortly afterwards. In 2018, owner Stumpf wanted to take the company public, but the growth story did not catch on with investors, and so the issue failed.
Exyte left Russia long ago
Stumpf has not made a new attempt on the floor since then. Because of the war in Ukraine, the chances of a successful IPO are not particularly good at the moment. Büchele: “If things go right on the markets, it will become an issue again. But of course the time is not ideal at the moment.”
So far, however, the war in Ukraine has not weighed on Exyte, and the sanctions against Russia are also irrelevant to the company. In view of the country’s economic decline, Büchele has long since closed the office in Moscow with 60 employees: “We said goodbye to Russia last autumn. We had to act because we preferred to use the capacities in other countries for profitable business.”
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