Henkes & Co becomes Conbility partner and shareholder

Conbility, a company specialising in advanced composite manufacturing technologies and automated production systems, has brought in Belgian family holding company Henkes & Co as a strategic partner and shareholder. The partnership is intended to provide a foundation for the company's next stage of development. Together with the new partner, Conbility's founders and team plan to accelerate the development and commercialisation of technologies for manufacturing high-performance composite components. The company also intends to expand its ability to support customers, from initial product and process development through industrialisation to production ramp-up. In composite manufacturing, the material and its final properties are created during the production process, which requires an understanding of the relationships between component design, material, process and production equipment. Conbility's interdisciplinary team combines expertise in these areas to develop solutions tailored to both component requirements and industrial production.

Tape placement and winding systems

One of the main areas of activity will remain the development and commercialisation of winding and automated tape placement systems. The solutions are designed to process thermoplastic tapes, thermoset prepregs and dry-fibre materials.

Applications include pipes, profiles, pressure vessels, rotor sleeves and other wound structures, as well as tailored laminates, preforms and structural composite components.

At the same time, Conbility is expanding its technology portfolio to include extrusion-based large-format additive manufacturing systems. Combining extrusion technology with automated tape placement and winding is intended to enable the development of hybrid manufacturing solutions. These combine the geometric flexibility and productivity of additive manufacturing with continuous-fibre reinforcement aligned with the load paths.

Support from process development to production launch

Conbility is also developing its in-house manufacturing capabilities to support customers throughout the industrialisation process. Using its own systems, the company can develop and validate manufacturing processes, produce prototypes and pre-series components, and support initial production while the customer's target system is being designed and built. Once the new installation has been commissioned, the validated process can be transferred to the customer's production environment.

This approach allows customers to develop and qualify new applications, provide samples to their own customers and meet initial market demand before their in-house production capacity is fully operational. Conbility's hands-on production experience is intended to feed into the continued development of its systems, supporting process reliability, productivity and quality.

Partnership focused on growth

"Since its foundation in 2015, Conbility has translated deep composite expertise into industrial solutions and built a broad customer base across its different business areas, ranging from some of the world's leading technology-driven companies to highly specialised industrial players. Behind this track record is an established interdisciplinary team that combines outstanding technological expertise with a pragmatic understanding of industrial applications and customer needs. We see significant potential to build on this foundation and are delighted to support the founders and their team as a committed shareholder and strategic partner in Conbility's next stage of development," said Ludwig Henkes, founder and president of Henkes & Co.

"With Henkes & Co at our side, we are gaining an experienced entrepreneurial partner who shares our long-term vision for industrial composite manufacturing. Over the past eleven years, we have built Conbility step by step, and we are excited about the opportunities that now lie ahead. With our full professional focus on Conbility and Henkes & Co as a strong partner, we have an excellent platform to accelerate our growth and take the company to its next stage of development," said Dr.-Ing. Michael Emonts and Dr.-Ing. Kai Fischer, co-founders and managing directors of Conbility.