Claas will invest about 40 million euros during the next few years in rebuilding its Bad Saulgau site with the core objective of adjust production capacities to meet increasing demand and further future growth.
Bad Saulgau is the Claas Group’s centre of excellence for the forage harvesting process chain from mowing through to the crop flow of the Jaguar. The site has developed considerably during recent years and has continued to increase its turnover despite the Covid-19 pandemic.
As part of an ongoing investment programme, the infrastructure of the site is currently being expanded and upgraded, while an existing 5,000 square metre hall is being redesigned in order to create additional assembly space. In parallel, the entire energy infrastructure is being adapted and upgraded over several stages to meet future production capacity. This will be followed by investments in the areas of production logistics and assembly optimisation. The total sum of the investments comes to about 40 million euros.
The success of Claas products intended for professional forage harvesting technology and, most importantly, the positive sales forecasts for the new Orbis row-crop headers mean that the structure of the site in Bad Saulgau has to be adapted.
“We’re continuing to observe an unbroken trend towards professional harvesting technology and enjoy an excellent positioning here with many product lines,” the head of Claas’s forage harvesting division and managing director at Claas Saulgau GmbH and Claas Material Handling GmbH, Uli Nickol, said. “An example of this is the enormous demand for our new Orbis row-crop headers, especially the new Orbis 900 that has significantly exceeded our expectations.
“In addition to technology for the harvesting chain based around the forage harvester, Claas will also be expanding, modernising and continuing to professionalise its range of mowers, tedders, swathers and balers with many new products during the next few years. Many new innovations are currently being developed and tested to achieve this.”
The long-term development of the product range has been consistently adjusted to global trends and the growth strategy at Claas, and the company noted that self-loading wagon harvesters are becoming progressively less important, and that unit sales are continuing to decline globally.
Therefore, Claas has decided to discontinue the production of loader and forage transport wagons at the end of the 2022 season, thereby creating additional capacity for Orbis production. The supply of spare parts and customer service for the Cargos series will continue to be guaranteed as usual in the future, with ongoing service issues continuing to be professionally addressed with the support of the product development department at Bad Saulgau.
