Phase 4: Leitz becomes leader of the world market in the wood,plastics & non-ferrous material processing industries and founds a company group specialised in metal processing

The qualified physicist Dr. Dieter Brucklacher had taken over the management in 1975. Under the aegis of Dr. Brucklacher, Leitz expanded in the following quarter of the century to an extent not seen before. The company that had been concentrated in Europe till then "crossed the ocean" and opened a production and sales plant in Brazil in 1979. Leitz again followed the successful strategy of being close to the customers of the woodworking industry. At the beginning of the 80s, the expansion into Great Britain and the USA area followed. Company-owned subsidiaries in Great Britain and the USA were started.Leitz then promoted its products in the large North American market which had an established wood industry consisting of construction parts, windows, doors and furniture industries.

From the early 80s, Leitz built up flexible quick productions in several countries, that were able to put special tools in small batches at the disposal - even far away from Germany. Moreover,from the middle of the decade, Leitz specifically extended its spectrum and its capacities by acquisitions. The smaller tooling company WIGO near Oberkochen was integrated into the company group in 1984. In 1988 Leitz had already taken a step into the growing Asian market with the foundation of a company-owned sales organisation in Japan for the woodworking and plastics processing industries. Later on, subsidiaries in Singapore (1994), Indonesia and Malaysia (1997), China (1998) and India (1999) followed.

It was evident that the development in the field of technology had not stagnated .In 1993, Leitz made use of electronics in a special way: memory chips were added to the machine tools. With this development plants with CNC-machining centres could be economically optimised through the Leitz Tool-Management-System.

Today,after the acquisition of the smaller companies KWO in 1994 and Schumacher in 1998,Leitz is an international company group with a complete product range, an extensive provider of solutions for all tooling applications in the professional woodworking and plastics processing in industry, and since the beginning of 2001,also for the sales organisation ITP (International Tooling Partner) particularly for the trade.

The diversification into the metal processing

A first big step into the diversification was the take-over of Wilhelm Fette in Schwarzenbek near Hamburg, a company rich in tradition. This company had been established in the industrial metal processing for decades and produces, besides tools for the high performance cutting of metal,complete machines for powder pressing for various industries. In 1990, as the next step into the metal processing and as an extension for obtaining in-house material competence, Leitz took over a pioneer in the development of tungsten carbide - the Austrian corporation Böhlerit. This additional know-how gained of the cutting material itself has been profitable for Leitz and all its companies to the present day. Another well-known medium-sized company Walter Kieninger from the Black Forest,  known for speciality cutting technique, joined Leitz in 1993. In the same year, the companies Fette, Böhlerit and Kieninger merged under the management of the specially founded Leitz Metalworking Technology GmbH & Co. KG to the LMT-Group.

In the meantime, the LMT-Group grew to a big, decentralised combine of competencies for nearly all arts of the metal processing through the incorporation of the US-American light metal specialist Onsrud Cutters (1999), the specialist for innovative clamping systems Bilz Werkzeugfabrik (2000) and the French specialist for metal bores Bélin (2001).

The Leitz company group today

In order to cater to different markets, industrial segments and customer bases Leitz Group and the LMT Group are managed separately the world over. Leitz in the 130^th year is a continuously growing and strong group employing a total work force of more than 6,200 to realise a turnover of more than 600 million Euro. Leitz has an annual investment of nearly about 50 million Euro to extend the group through new partners, to strengthen and extend production plants, to invest in new equipment with foresight and to optimise sales and service network in order to be as close to  the customer as possible. More than 5% of the total turnover is invested into research and development to come up with technological innovations, thus ensuring the world leader status of Leitz.

Despite his foresightedness Albert Leitz could not perhaps have imagined how the workshop he founded in Oberkochen in 1876 would metamorphose into the internationally renowned technology giant of today.