CEO Asko Nevala’s blog: 2020 highlights & 2021 strategy at Alteams

Covid 19 was undoubtedly the issue that defined 2020 the most. Our priorities were to keep our team safe and healthy and to secure customer deliveries. We have succeeded in these key targets quite well. Only very few of our employees have been infected and none of them have suffered serious disease. We have been able to keep all our operations running as planned and coronavirus influence on our customer deliveries has been very minor.

During 2020 we have focused on the long-term improvement of our competitiveness by implementing several important structural changes, such as rearrangement of our global locations, reconsideration of our group functions, and fixed costs adaptations all around the organization. We already started this process before the pandemic hit the industry which has helped us to cope with this issue. These changes were an important part of our development plan for the previous years.

In 2020 we also ramped up new projects into mass production. This was very crucial for our future growth as many of them have increasing volumes and long lifetimes.

As several important improvements were done in 2020, we are much better prepared for 2021. We expect the first half of the year to still suffer from low volumes in many customer segments, but we are also ready for sudden peaks in demand, as visibility in our business sector is quite poor.

Our development plan for 2021 is strongly focused on operational excellence. Our factories are working hard to improve their efficiency, as well as agility in delivery capability. To support that work, our investments into machine modernization and automation will continue. On the capacity investment side, we have decided to increase production capabilities with a bigger HPDC machine in our plant in Poland. The first deliveries are already planned for Q4 2021.