Andreas Schweiger, Sales Director
For years, German outfit Micro Laser Tech (MLT) has practically been the only “go-to company” when it came to micro laser perforating tasks. The firm attained its global reputation for providing reliably functioning systems that accomplish precise perforation tasks at consistently high quality and astonishing speeds. When MLT’s long-term marketing director Axel Näther left the company at the end of November last year, his colleague Andreas Schweiger assumed the former’s position. Schweiger filled in Tobacco Asia why MLT’s products and services remain unmatched, giving the few competitors around a tough time.
Tobacco Asia (TA): Andreas, MLT is actually sort of a successor company to now defunct Rofin, one of the pioneers of micro laser perforation in a tobacco industry setting. Would that be a correct assessment?
Andreas Schweiger (AS): It’s a little more complex than that. Actually, the polygon technology that we are today utilizing in micro laser perforation was originally developed in the 1980s by German company Carl Basel Lasertechnik. Later on, Rofin bought out Carl Basel Lasertechnik, inheriting that technology. The founders of MLT originally worked for Rofin, but eventually decided to set up their own company. MLT competed against Rofin for about 20 years. When Rofin eventually went out of business, MLT was left standing as pretty much the only company that can provide this sort of technology.
TA: So you are saying MLT is the only company globally that supplies micro laser perforating technology to the tobacco industry?
AS: Actually, not really. There are competitors. But, we are building very high performance systems that deliver very good perforation quality at really high outputs.
TA: The unchallenged market leader, then…?
AS: Yes, we are definitely that. Of course, there are some Chinese companies nowadays. They more or less copied our machines, but it took them 20 years to do that; and they simply cannot come even close to reach our systems’ performance level. Just to give you a number… MLT systems are perforating at a speed of 600 to 700 meters [of tipping paper] per minute. The Chinese machines, though they are obviously a lot cheaper, can currently reach a maximum put-through of 300 meters per minute. So when it comes to high output and high quality, we are still unmatched.
TA: But usually the Chinese are rather accomplished at back engineering, often even improving on the original technology…
AS: That may indeed be true for certain technologies, but there is one specific component in our machines that is difficult to copy, perhaps even impossible; and that’s our polygon technology.
TA: You’ve got to explain that.
AS: The polygon is a multi-edged wheel inside the machine; 14 edges to be exact. So, it’s not round. During perforation tasks this wheel spins extremely fast. There are only two manufacturers in the world that can manufacture a motor capable of spinning that wheel at 1,500 hertz a minute. When a laser beam is shot at the spinning wheel, each of its edges reflecting the beam and sending it through a series of opticals and mirrors. You could say this mechanism creates a pulsing effect. The laser pulses are finally being directed on to the paper surface, whereas the paper itself is moving very fast through the machine as well. At this point the pulsing laser singes holes into the paper sheet. The faster you want to achieve that perforation, the faster the polygonal wheel has to spin.
TA: It seems complex. But don’t you need a very powerful laser for that?
AS: That’s correct. The faster the wheel spins, the more laser power you need. We are going with 2,000 watts of laser power on this wheel. That is enough to cut steel, actually.
TA: The friction caused by the mindboggling spinning rate and the continuous exposure to a highly powered laser… that ought to generate enormous heat, doesn’t it?
AS: Yes, it does. That is why the polygon wheel requires a very, very special coating. To be lightweight, the wheel’s base material is aluminum. The coating itself is a patented mixture of many materials, including gold. That is all that I can reveal, for obvious reasons.
TA: Of course. How many machines would be required in a large cigarette manufacturing plant to handle its huge output volumes?
AS: Large cigarette factories use up about 30,000 bobbins of tipping paper every month, whereas one bobbin is 3,000 meters. They can comfortably handle that with two of our machines. By contrast, they would need 20 Chinese machines to handle the same paper put-through.
TA: And what about the punching speed? How many holes per second are achievable?
AS: Our largest machine can laser-singe up to 1 million holes per second. That’s the maximum. Each hole has a diameter of just 50 microns, which is all but invisible to the naked eye. I know it’s hard to believe, but you also have to consider that its of course not one tiny hole after another tiny hole that is punched. A single tipping paper typically has 3 or 4 lanes of holes in it. Our large machine is capable of processing up to 32 paper bobbins side by side, and each bobbin holds 10 rows of tipping paper side by side. When we combine that with the high speed at which the paper sheets are fed through the machine, that is how we achieve that large number of holes. This is actually measured in Coresta units [CU]. In China, they produce only one or two lanes of holes in their tipping papers, so their CU values are low, hovering at only 200 CU or so. In Korea, for example, they have 4,000 CU, which means you need a lot more holes in the tipping paper.
TA: We are in the realm of really high performance here. And MLT at present truly is the only company in the world that can achieve that speed and performance?
AS: Yes, without exaggeration, I can say that. It’s just the plain truth.
TA: So why do your few competitors seem incapable of catching up to MLT?
AS: Talking about some of the Chinese companies, they have been trying to copycat our machines for years, but were only partially successful. But, what they do have engineered is good enough for them. They are not really trying to sell their machines globally, as we do. They market them domestically. So that’s one thing. The other thing is that we are talking about a niche market. It’s not a volume market. When I look back to the 1980s, when we developed this technology together with a big manufacturer in Germany of tipping paper, Benkert, we only did it because that was the time when “light” cigarettes emerged. So it’s an organically grown business.
TA: Yet, despite your global market dominance and considering that it’s a niche market, it nevertheless appears imperative to you to still exhibit at pretty much every tobacco industry event.
AS: Our presence at these exhibitions is not primarily to sell our products. Our main purpose is to curate our existing customers, touching base with them. But if we should receive a serious inquiry at any of these shows, we certainly won’t mind.
TA: How ubiquitous is the demand for lightning fast tipping paper perforation in a tobacco world increasingly dominated by vapes, heated tobacco, pouches, and the like? Would you say that you are serving a diminishing market and that fewer and fewer companies will need this type of technology in the future?
AS: Only crazy people would try establishing a company in this particular machinery segment at this point. [laughs] But honestly, we are still quite in a healthy position. However, we have seen in recent years that tobacco companies started moving away from standalone machines like ours and moved to what we call online perforation. That’s a procedure where the laser perforation is done in the cigarette maker itself [instead of being accomplished in a separate machine]. … So we recognized that trend and knew that we had to develop something similar. We now can indeed offer an online perforation kit, which can be retrofitted on any cigarette maker [that’s not yet fitted with an integrated laser perforation system]. The still relatively new category of heated tobacco products likewise needs perforation. We have an online kit available for that as well. We are all set. We do have solutions for existing and future customers.