Jydsk Aluminum Industri: The Corona crisis forced Europe’s largest aluminium gravity die-casting firm to change strategy, resulted to see profits

In 2020, Europe´s largest aluminium gravity die-casting companies with customers worldwide, Jydsk Aluminum Industri (JAI) booked DKK 0.6 million profits before tax and it is counted as significantly better than the loss of DKK 5 million in 2019.

The far better result has brought some fresh air to the organization, as several employees were laid-off due to a slow production rate.

Kenn Christensen, CEO, JAI said: “The previous year has gone in such a way that we, like many others in the metal industry, experienced a total collapse in the second quarter, and were also strongly negatively affected in the third quarter.”

“What makes us still come out with a profit is that we have embarked on a multi-year strategic transformation process, where we have been in the process of replacing large parts of our product portfolio, where we leave old items out. Where we have previously made medium-complicated items for trucks, today we are over and making extremely highly complicated items, including for marine, motorcycles, battery boxes for electric cars, high-voltage systems and so on”, says Kenn Christensen.

He further added: “The orders that make up the new type of production are something we landed several years ago, which has now finally gone into production. What is so lucky for us when the corona hits is that all those issues are coming in and it has one by one been able to almost compensate for the corona disaster that was and therefore we can get through anyway with a very modest profit.”

The CEO of the Danish firm quoted “The change in strategy, but also the general upswing in the industry, can to that extent also be felt at JAI in the new financial year, which is now five months old.”

“On the way into 2021, the corona decline is a thing of the past, and all these new items are fully in production, so we are historically busy and are at a turnover level that is at least 25% over last year.”

“The dismissed employees from last spring are also long gone at the factory in Herning. We have hired almost 40 new employees since the late autumn last year, and we are still missing almost 20. We are looking for unskilled labour that we can train in production, and skilled blacksmiths, industrial technicians, people who can weld and so on”, explained Kenn Christensen.