# Transcript

Narrator

[Music playing]

We all know what a business is. But what exactly is meant by the term ‘business’? Businesses are often defined by their size, products, industry sectors and ownership structures. And all businesses tend to evolve through time. German company, Schaefer Kalk, has been a family-run business for five generations. It’s currently a company with over 600 employees specialising in the quarrying and processing of limestone.

Klaus Schaefer

[Managing Director, 1966–2003]

[Translated from German]

The company was founded in 1860, 150 years ago, by my great-grandfather Johann Schaefer. His most important decision was to buy limestone deposits in Hahnstätten which is a particularly pure limestone deposit. This later gave us the opportunity to be a leader in the market.

Heike Horn

[Managing Director, Finance & Administration]

So the company is 100 per cent family-owned, so all the family members are more or less involved. But in the management of the company, it’s just two of us – it’s my cousin and myself.

Narrator

[Music playing]

The site at Hahnstätten was one of several businesses invested in by Johann Schaefer, who was a lawyer from the small town of Diez. Spreading his risk across a number of businesses, it was the limeworks which proved to be the most successful and has lasted as a business for over 150 years.

Heike Horn

We are quarrying limestone and processing the limestone and manufacturing products for different industry-based products for the steel industry – building industry and environmental things and so on and so forth. We do have about 700 people working for the company. We’re present in several countries – main presence here in Germany, we have a subsidiary in Malaysia and smaller subsidiaries in France, in Austria, in Czech Republic, and well some in Germany, too.

Narrator

[Music playing]

The nature of the product is a key factor in the way a business develops. The production processes at Schaefer Kalk include the extraction of limestone from their quarries and the processing into lime and precipitated calcium carbonates, or PCCs, which are sold for use in paper production, including cigarette papers, as well as the manufacture of plastics, paints, ink, dietary supplements, medicines, and as a bulking agent in food and cosmetics. The last 150 years has seen a continual evolution in the variety of products which have been developed to supply a changing market and a number of long-term clients with very specific needs.

Andreas Kinnen

[Managing Director, Sales & Marketing]

Yes, we do have customers that have been with the company for a very long time. One of them, like BASF, actually became a customer back in the 1860s, and that we can still maintain. But they’re also quite a few, number of customers that have been with us for many, many decades.

Narrator

[Music playing]

Since its beginning in 1860, Schaefer Kalk has become one of the world’s most experienced PCC producers and the world’s largest independent manufacturer of hydrated lime, processing more than 3 million tonnes of limestone a year with 15 kilns in continual operation. And while the company continues to expand internationally, the new Merschel quarry ensures there is sufficient supply locally for the next 80 years. Running a quarry and building vast processing facilities within a family-owned structure has given Schaefer Kalk an especially long-term view of business.