The European Power Transmission Engineering industry met from 5 - 7 June 2008 in Brussels for their annual meeting at the invitation of the Belgium Association AGORIA. 2007 and the beginning of 2008 continued to be successful for the European Power Transmission Industry. The European production industry (without bearings) in 2007 grew by 8% to more than 14 billion Euros. One of the main driving forces of this growth is the wind energy industry where the key players are European. The companies continue to have full order books and a positive outlook for both 2008 and 2009. For 2008 experts forecast another period of growth of more than 5% (though this could be limited by a worldwide shortage of both capacity and materials).
The main problems our industry will face in the future are the higher energy and material costs, a lack of production capacity, the weak exchange rates and the European demographic problem, which could lead to a lack of engineers and specialized workers.
The newly elected president, Georges Roobaert, Vice President of Hansen Transmissions International nv, pointed out that: "The future success and further growth of our industry will strongly depend on attracting sufficient numbers of technically skilled people." Our sector, besides being capital intensive, is also very know-how intensive. Therefore we need talented engineers and well-educated technical operators. Because of this and because of the demographic problem, it is forecast that for the next few years there will be an overall shortage of these kind of people and therefore we need to take action to make our industry more visible. "Youngsters should know that our sector is hi-tech and offers a multitude of attractive and challenging jobs," says Georges Roobaert.
During the meeting the new website of EUROTRANS (www.euro-trans.org)was approved and launched. . It was decided that the motto of our industry will be "EUROPEAN KNOWLEDGE FOR GLOBAL DRIVE SOLUTIONS".
Mr. Helmut Holz , Flender AG, was approved as Vice President and Dr. Andrea Scanavini, Gear World Spa, after his successful 3-year presidency, as Past President.
EUROTRANS: European Committee of Associations of Manufacturers of Gears and Transmission Parts
Within the EU the member associations representing the interests of more than 600 enterprises with a collective annual production of more than 14 billion EURO (without bearings industry and the automotive business). Within Europe at least 150.000 people are employed by our sector.
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