As guests among friends

Words of praise to the effect that “our industry is unique” are often heard in get-togethers with relatives, friends and neighbors. However, on looking deeper, this statement is sometimes quickly put into perspective by mentioning such issues as constant work overload, poor pay as well as frequent work on public holidays and on weekends etc.  

In these get-togethers, I personally cannot resist praising the benefits of our industry, the precast industry – garnished by positive examples from practice. In mid-August, for example, I was on a business trip to distant Brazil – but still to good friends. Apart from the Concrete Show in São Paulo, I visited four precast plants in the south of this gigantic country: Antares Pré-Fabricados, Torri Engenharia, Construtora Engemold and Sistemas Construtivos do Brasil. After many years of recession the market seems to be slowly recovering – thats why our project partners were in a positive mood. It should be mentioned only incidentally that the guest from Germany was especially warmly received. In this place, I would therefore like to express my heartfelt thanks to Diogo and Tiago Emmendoerfer, Nabor and Jlia Torri, Jones Zaniratti de Oliveira, Henrique Deboni and Prof. Dr. Hélio Greven.

You can therefore look forward to reports on the show and the plants visited in BFT International: the companies Antares and Engemold are already being presented in this issue, shortly followed by reports on Torri and SisCoBras. By the way, I had, similar experience in other parts of the precast world and can therefore rightly claim: our industry is really unique!