Mannheim (Germany), April 2, 2007 – Ludger Bartels, General Manager of Röchling Engineering Plastics, has been appointed to the Röchling Group's Management Board from April 1, 2007. He is in charge of the High-Performance Plastics division, which includes the Röchling Engineering Plastics and Röchling Sustaplast groups. „In recent years we have aligned our enterprise consistently to plastics processing. In Ludger Bartels an experienced specialist and successful manager is strengthening the management, and that will have a positive effect on the entire Group,“ said Georg Duffner, Chairman of the Röchling Group's Management Board. Röchling, he said, stood for proficiency in plastics, and with Bartels' appointment that know-how was now represented even more strongly at the executive level.
Bartels, 53, is a tried and tested plastics expert. He graduated in Osnabrück as a Diplom-Ingenieur (Master of Engineering) in materials technology and joined today's Röchling Engineering Plastics KG in 1977, working in various positions, first as assistant to the head of the extrusion department.
Two years later Bartels was Production Manager of Material Preparation and Extrusion. He was in charge of project management when Impact Plastics was acquired in the United States in 1987. In 1988 he was appointed head of development, quality assurance and extrusion and in 1991 technical manager of the thermoplastics profit center. Bartels was in technical charge of the acquisition of Leripa Kunststoff GmbH & Co. KG, Austria, and Blumer, Italy, in 1993. In 1994 he took over as head of the thermoset Proficenter. In 1995 he was in technical charge of the acquisition of Permali, France. In 1996 he was responsible for the restructuring of Impact Plastics and Permali.
Later that year he was appointed first assistant general manager and a year later general manager of the Röchling Engineering Plastics Group. In 1998 the company acquired under his management Plastpur, Spain, and in 1999 Trovidur, Troisdorf, Germany. In 1999 he was named Chairman of the Röchling Engineering Plastics Group's Management Board. In 2001 the Group was further strengthened by the acquisition of Rimito, Finland, and Formaterm, Sweden. These acquisitions were followed in 2003 by that of Extrusion Silon, Czech Republic.
Since October 2003 Bartels has, in addition to Chairman of the Röchling Engineering Plastics Group's Management Board, been Chairman of the Board of Sustaplast KG. Bartels is married and has three children.
The Röchling Group is a worldwide operating plastics group based in Mannheim, Germany. With 6,000 employees at 54 locations in 18 countries, Röchling is today one of the leading international plastics processing enterprises. With its High-Performance Plastics and Automotive Plastics divisions, the Group's sales total over EUR 1 billion in Europe, North America and Asia.
