About the courage of cross-thinking/Facing the challenges of the market

摘要

The motto 《Changes in trading》 of the 2007 Steel Traders' Conference organized by the German Association of Steel Traders (BDS) fitted perfectly the topic of the presentation by Michael Duckwitz. 《Without the restructuring of our company at the end of the 1980s we would today be a steel trading company with regional scope and without preferences or a unique sales proposition》, explains the Managing Director of the middle-tier company Hoselmann Stahl. International division of labour, globalisation and the boom in the threshold countries have reached even the smallest steel trading business. Duckwitz doubts that his company would have managed to survive beyond the year 2003 without the restructuring. The about 60 employees of Hoselmann Stahl GmbH, a middle-tier steel trader headquartered in Hanover, Germany, achieve an annual turnover of more than 70 million euros. Founded in 1928, the owner-managed company has been active in the German market for almost eight decades as a trader of quality and high-grade structural steels and in the field of steel pre-working. Since 2006 the company is a fully-owned subsidiary of Stap-pert Spezial-Stahl Handel GmbH and part of the IMS International Metal Service Group.