MKM puts faith in technical innovation

In capital-intensive sectors such as the copper industry, technology and innovation represent a powerful lever on competitiveness. In contrast to advances achieved in production techniques, copper processing has hardly advanced at all for decades.

When searching for areas of potential advancement in copper processing, one quickly discovers the processes of casting and hot-reshaping. The conventional manufacturing technology with its form casting (shaft slugs or bolts), cooling, reheating and then reshaping over various stages is very costly and prone to many possible hold ups.

For this reason, since its privatization MKM has focused consistently on modern, continuous-operation casting processes. We use a vertical continuous plant for casting bolts as a preliminary product for bars and tubing, and a horizontal wire-casting plant for the manufacture of copper and copper-silver cast wire bars. As for copper strip, where there was no efficient technology available, this was developed by us. Our Conti-M® plant currently produces around 50,000 tonnes of copper pre-strip strip per annum.