Aurrenak celebrates its 40th anniversary

Aurrenak S.coop, company located in Vitoria-Gasteiz, has celebrated the 40th anniversary of the founding of the cooperative in an emotional in-house event, held at a winery in La Rioja at which all current staff members and retirees that have worked in this company over the past 40 years attended. During the event a 40 minute video reflecting the history of the company since its founding in 1974 up until the present day was screened, using images and tributes from the founders, current workers and customers. After the video all of the guests enjoyed a wine tasting session and an excellent lunch where they shared experiences and anecdotes.

The founding members were the central point of the event, given that their presence and testimonies help keep the values that drove them to found the cooperative alive. That 1974 is now a distant memory, when a team of competent professionals, all eager to work, set out an adventure to establish a business within an industry that demanded tools at a very local level, focusing primarily on companies in the Basque Country, in particular Duranguesado and Alto Deba. The start-up of the cooperative faced many difficulties and uncertainties, a business model that was beginning to be known and spreading throughout the industrial areas of the zone and which, from the very outset, required all of its employees to have a basic understanding of business management. From the early years they had to struggle to find funding and suitable professionals to enable the company to grow.

The progress made by this cooperative over 40 years, integrated within the Mondragon Corporation, has been exemplary: It evolved from a workshop of 15 people providing a local service, to become a company with various offices worldwide, 130 employees and export levels accounting for over 90% of its sales. All of these developments, clearly directed toward export, have been progressively gaining presence and prestige within different international markets.

Tooling Technology Worldwide

Aurrenak’s business focuses on the design and manufacture of moulds and tooling for the mass production casting industry, both in iron and aluminium, specialising in pressure injection, low pressure, gravity and green sand casting technologies.

Its major customers are vehicle manufacturers or the suppliers of mass produced iron and aluminium parts for these manufacturers, such as the VW Group, General Motors, Nemak, Kolben-Schmidt, BMW, Fritz Winter, Honda, Nissan, Fagor Group, Tupy Group, Caterpillar, Volvo, Scania and Teksid, among others.

What sets Aurrenak apart nowadays is its competence in engineering development, with a team of over 30 people. The tooling solutions and technology needed by each customer are studied and designed, thanks to a mix of experience and calculations of mathematical simulations. In addition to which focus is not only placed on the product (tooling) but also on the development process in order to achieve a quality end piece. This internal knowledge is based on the casting itself and, for this same reason, it has all the facilities it needs to test all the tooling before its delivery to the customer, i.e. our installations are equipped with an injection moulding machine, a low pressure machine, a gravity casting machine and sand coreblowers.

Thanks to the latest equipment for simulation, 3D design, CAM programming, high-speed and 5-axis machining, dimensional control installations and project management models, Aurrenak is capable of offering manufacturing costs and, at the same time, levels of end quality that make Aurrenak globally competitive.

The products for which Aurrenak tooling are primarily directed are engine blocks and cylinder heads, both for automobiles and commercial vehicles, employing technologies for iron, aluminium gravity and low pressure casting. Similarly, high pressure aluminium technology (injection) focuses on engine blocks and different clutch and mechanism housings, cylinder head covers and engine blocks for cars and motorcycles.

LORAMENDI

Along with LORAMENDI, S.Coop., world leader in the supply of casting equipment for core making and moulding, we have formed the Agrupación de Fundición y Utillaje, S. Coop (Casting and Tooling Association Cooperative).

In recent years export figures, both for Loramendi and Aurrenak, have exceeded 90% of our sales, directed at countries such as Germany, China, India, Sweden, Poland, Czech Republic, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa, among others.

Today Loramendi and Aurrenak share business and engineering resources and can present joint bids to offer their customers a complete solution that covers the machinery and tooling needs to achieve an extremely high quality end product. For this reason they share offices in order to deal with customers’ commercial and after sales needs in Detroit (USA), Saltillo (Mexico), Reims (France), Dusseldorf (Germany), Beijing (China), Pune (India) and Moscow (Russia).

Mondragón Corporation

Aurrenak, S. Coop. forms part of the Mondragon Group, a business group comprising of independent, self-governed cooperatives with production subsidiaries and corporate offices in 41 countries and sales in over 150.

Mondragón has a commercial and productive presence on five continents in the industrial, financial, distribution and knowledge sectors.

It is the foremost business group in the Basque Country and ranked tenth among the major Spanish companies, with more than 289 companies, 80,000 employees and an annual turnover of over 14,000 million Euros.