This is how Turla survived the crisis of recent months unharmed

The crisis of the past two years touched only slightly Turla, a well-known constructor of equipment for the aluminium extrusion industry. Davide Turla, CEO of the company headquartered in Paderno Franciacorta, Brescia, in Italy, confirms this success with great satisfaction. The company’s success during the crisis is due to important investments made by many of the long-time customers, who in the past had made use of the reliability and fast pay-back of the machinery constructed by Turla. “We were very pleased to see how many of our traditional customers have invested even in this moment of crisis, awarding major contracts that testify to their trust in us” commented Davide Turla.
In any case the economic situation appears to have improved. What has changed in the market compared to 2009? Turla continued “There was probably the realization by companies that the crisis will not be overcome just by the return of a favourable economic situation but especially with the recovery of competitiveness based on the improvement of product quality and reduction of industrial manufacturing costs. These are goals that have always been given priority by our company when developing and designing our plants. Entrepreneurs have evaluated the crisis, they realized that the situation is serious but, unlike a year ago, they think about the future with more optimism”.
Turla abandoned market analysis on a purely geographic basis a long time ago and what is seen on the market does nothing but confirm it: the areas and businesses that have always given priority to investment in technological development were the first to hold their head up again. A striking example in recent months is the German market, which is positively influencing all those areas which traditionally revolve around this economy.
Two new products at this time are particularly dear to Davide Turla: the new extrusion press 18FR7 and the log furnace STeP5.The press finally allows Turla to offer its customers a complete production line from the log to the profile dispatched. The design and construction of this press were carried out with the usual tendency to produce robust and highly efficient compact machines able to guarantee minimal downtime, proper billet management with particular care given to all the components involved both in the loading phase and in the extrusion process itself. Turla’s machines feature accurate and simultaneously easily accessible diagnostics, limited and easy maintenance, redundancy of critical components to ensure the proper operation of the machine even in the event of a failure and all those other characteristics typical of high quality equipment. The achievement of these objectives was clearly facilitated by the high level of collaboration existing with partners for the supply of sub-components of the machine and the significant experience accumulated by Turla’s engineers revamping mechanical, hydraulic, electrical and software systems of different presses combined with new extrusion equipment supplied. The STeP5 furnace (Super Thermal Efficiency aimed to Production) is a high thermal efficiency machine. It heats logs with consumption that is almost 50% less than current standards on the market and at the same time has very low environmental impact. The use of one of these furnaces implies the reduction of CO2 emissions by about 300 tonnes per year, the equivalent of 70 cars that travel about 18,000 Km per year. These objectives were reached as a result of the application of methodological analysis conducted by the technical staff of the company on combustion and energy recovery from exhaust fumes and the resulting optimization of these important stages of the reheating process. The improvements guaranteed by this furnace are not limited to low consumption and low environmental impact, characteristics in and of them-selves already very important, but they also ensure the extension of the ‘life cycle’ of its critical compo-nents and therefore a significant reduction of maintenance costs.
Davide Turla explained “Our goal for the coming months is to keep doing what we have been doing in recent years: dedicate ourselves to our clients, develop the most technologically advanced products we can, and continue lowering the environmental impact of the other machines as we have with the STeP5 furnace”.