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Isola: Evolving with the Market
December 26, 2017 | Barry Matties, I-Connect007Estimated reading time: 13 minutes
Stollenwerk: Yes. What we are doing is working very closely with the European Space Agency. They are still looking for a local producer, and we are a local producer. It fits their strategy, and we are also doing well, so this could be for us also a certain growth. Since we were not so involved in the polyimide business in the past, we may be involved in the near future.
Matties: Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you feel like we should be sharing?
Stollenwerk: In terms of supporting the Isola strategy to produce in all regions, we are doing R&D in all regions as well. We have invested a lot of money in our R&D center in Düren since we had the very low changeover in terms of people. We have a lot of experience, and we want to use this experience for further developments. We have started to run the R&D, for example, in two shifts, which is uncommon. We are also adapting to reduce the time to market for these kinds of products, especially for the automotive world.
Matties: What drives your R&D?
Stollenwerk: First, we have very close connections to the OEMs here, especially to the automotive OEMs like Autoliv, Bosch, Continental, Hella and all the big guys. We are doing R&D for what they call the front edge, for what they believe they will need in three or five years. Then when it comes a little bit closer to their reality, we start again to do larger projects together. In terms of the high Tg, but high thermal reliable base material with thick copper cladding, thick copper will be for sure an issue, an important issue for E-mobility. Here, I think we are also showing our capability to make these R&D things here. To make the small series with products we have already from the varnish point of view, but putting things together with thick copper, including providing special high resin content bonding prepregs with specific flow characteristic’s that you need to close all these big gaps after etching.
I think these are major things where we are working on, on the R&D side, where we are running two shifts in order to make some new first samples very fast.
Matties: Karl, we certainly appreciate your time today. It's nice to catch up with you. Glad to hear things are going well.
Stollenwerk: Thank you very much for your time. It was nice to talk with you about how we see these things. We will work hard to continue in that way.
Matties: No doubt about that. Thank you.
Stollenwerk: Thank you.
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