Today, Krohne is an international company with a broad portfolio of instruments, solutions and services, primarily in process measurement technology and for various industries. With over 4000 employees worldwide, the company offers local contacts for their customers in over 100 countries, and supports them in instrumentation projects of any size, from single devices to mega projects.
But it wasn't always like this: when Ludwig Krohne founded the company in 1921, the first customers were a small number of steel producers from the Ruhr area. At that time, Krohne built variable area flowmeters for hardening furnaces.
Unfortunately, the Second World War then brought great tragedy, as both Ludwig Krohne and his son Karl, who would have been his successor, lost their lives. This left the company in the hands of Ludwig's wife Anna Krohne. In 1949, she asked her grandson Kristian Rademacher-Dubbick to help her in the business. He lived as an artist, and Anna Krohne needed someone with creative ideas to help her market the products of the company. He accepted this task and soon took over full responsibility for Krohne.
At Krohne, Kristian Rademacher-Dubbick found a new environment in which he could act creatively. As someone who had no knowledge about measurement technology or its marketing, he first wanted to find out what drove our customers, what they expected from the company and its products, and what their wishes were. So he decided to ask them directly, and took his bicycle to visit the customers in the area.
This way he found out about their expectations and wishes regarding process measurement technology. They also advised him to hire an engineer and to always put technology first. The engineer turned out to be the perfect sparring partner for the creative and unconventional ideas that my father presented to him in order to fulfil the customers' wishes. He kept this approach throughout his career, and initiated technical innovations and motivated his employees to think creatively.
This is how Krohne became a pioneer in many measuring technologies that are standards in the process industry today. The world's first electromagnetic flowmeter was a Krohne device, so was the first contactless radar device for level measurement. The realisation and industrialisation of these ideas were anything but easy and sometimes very lengthy. Parallel to pushing technologies forward, the company developed in the field of internationalisation: from the 1960s onwards, many German companies began to set up sites abroad. The company followed their customers, and by the 1980s already had subsidiaries in countries such as China, USA, United Kingdom, Japan, India, Russia and South Africa.
Krohne developed from a pure measuring technology manufacturer towards a technology company already at an early stage, and consistently investigated new technologies and integrated them into industrial measurement technology. Quantum leaps in innovation such as the development of a differential pressure measuring cell or the Entrained Gas Management technology for Coriolis devices could only be realised because people had the freedom to develop.
This demonstrates to what extent Krohne needs creative and innovative ideas: creativity is essential for the development of new measurement solutions for the future. That's why Krohne is placing their 100th anniversary under the “the spirit of creativity”. It stands for an open approach to unconventional ideas. By placing the anniversary under this core message, Krohne has the opportunity to show sides of the company that are more than pure technology: it is a multi-layered combination of core values. The spirit of adding value describes how we promote creative ideas and out-of-the-box thinking to realise added value for our clients.
The 100th anniversary will consist of many different activities that will address and involve customers, partners and employees alike.