From aspiration to the creation of something lasting - 60 years of GAW
With consistency and farsightedness, the GAW family firm has developed from manufacturing fittings to being a constructor of industrial plant with international connections.
Enthusiasm for new ideas and the quest to make them real and to make things move were the driving forces which prompted the graduate engineer Erhardt Pildner-Steinburg to set up a company. And so, in 1951, with a staff of five, he began to manufacture drive sections for woodworking machines and expanded the fields of activity with the production of machine feeds for the paper industry.
A few years later he was already venturing into plant construction with his company, GRAZER ARMATUREN-WERK – the present GAW technologies and development nucleus of GAW GROUP companies, and in the mid-60s he finally succeeded in breaking into this business area with the construction of a kaolin dissolving plant for the Steyrermühl paper mill.
After the premature death of the founder of the firm in 1974, his two sons, Jochen Pildner-Steinburg MA and Jörg Pildner-Steinburg BEng, together with Peter Stuffer and many further employees who have been committed to GAW for decades and are partially still in action in the company nowadays, have most successfully followed in the well-trodden footsteps of the founder. Their knowledge of the process engineering of products in liquid and powder form in the course of paper manufacture has been consistently upgraded and this enabled them to seize the opportunity to make a name for themselves for coated papers and cardboard in a market noted for its sophisticated demands. The business has steadily built up an international customer base and now GAW is a globally preferred supplier, wherever value-creating solutions in processing plant for the manufacture of refined paper and cardboard need to be found for individual customers. In this respect the partnership with VOITH is especially mentionable, since the model of systems and technologies complementing one another has emerged successfully over the years.
But it was and is not only in the paper industry that the portfolio of products and services has been systematically developed. The firm developed new areas of business either on its own or by strategic buying-up of other companies, which, for example, has taken it into the plastics and chemical industry, the car industry and into the area of environmental technology. Today, Grazer Armaturenwerk Pildner-Steinburg GmbH, which is still 100 % family-owned, consists of 24 independent companies (GAW GROUP), generating an annual turnover of 180 million Euro and providing safe employment for over 1150 people, is also very well set up for the future.
Click here to read an interview with the CEO and owner of GAW, Mr. Jochen Pildner-Steinburg, on the occasion of the 60 year anniversary of GAW.