The Company
Founded in Sweden in 1994 by three cable machinery engineers, Windak is an engineering-driven company with over 90 years of combined experience in cable industry. It started its North American operations in 1997 and introduced its first high-speed rewind line in 1998. The company focuses
on cable packaging machinery. Its first order was to Volvo for a com-plete pallet handling packaging system.
The company’s innovative technologies include high-speed rewind lines for fibre optic cable, fully automatic spooling lines, versatile coiling lines, a multitude of palletizers and breakthrough coiling solutions for packaging cable products into boxes or bags.
It has delivered its products to 29 countries worldwide, and its customers are the leading companies in the industry.
With offices in North Carolina, USA, Tallinn, Estonia; Stockholm, Sweden; Sydney, Australia; and Shanghai, China, Windak is currently one of the world’s largest suppliers of automatic spoolers and coilers, and the largest supplier of spoolers in the USA.
Speaking with the Wire & Cable India team about the rise of his company, Mr. Staffan Edstrom, Managing Director, Windak Group, said, “Windak is a Swedish company started in 1994. We specialise in automatic packaging machines for cable industry. Primarily, we pack cables on coils or in boxes, or on spools. We have many different sizes for machinery to suit many different small and large products. We are particularly interested in making sure that we work with the customer to define exactly their need in terms of the packaging requirement. We don’t know how to make cable, but we know how to pack it faster and better than anyone else. Over the years, we have received many return customers. We have an operation in North Carolina, USA. We are currently the largest provider of automatic spooling equipment in the USA. We export our products to 29 countries and we are slowly getting into the Asian markets. We have been focusing on the Indian and the Middle East markets; all these are growing markets for us. We’ve been present primarily in the European and American areas.”
New Developments
Speaking about the developments that have taken place at Windak in the recent past, Mr. Edstrom said, “New developments have taken place in mainly two key areas in the last two years. One is for Europe and America. In these places, customers go into home improvement stores often looking for short-length cable packaging; so there’s a big need for short-length cable packaging… . They don’t want to buy cable that is 90 to 100 m long in a box. They want to buy cables that are 10 to 20 m long. So we have developed two different coilers – one for short-length coils…to hold a coil together…that can be dropped in a plastic bag or into a box. So, that’s one new area. The other area is also a coiler for cables that are 90 to 100 meters long. This area involves high-speed coiling that is integrated directly with the extrusion line. So, you can do your complete production process in one step rather than do your cable in one extrusion line, take it up to a big reel, go to the second production step where you do the rewinding operation at a slower pace. We do all that automatically.”
Adding Value to the Indian Cable Industry
Speaking about the new coiling machine’s suitability to the Indian market, Mr. Edstrom said, “This particular machine is suited to pack products that are flexible single conductors 90 m in length. It’s a coiling machine in a vertical design. We make a coil in vertical fashion and then drop it straight into a box. Boxes are quite a large packaging way in India for this type of product.
“This coiling machine will add value to the Indian cable industry by removing the second step in the packaging process thus creating a less requirement for floor space, for machine maintenance and for
upkeep of general administration of the more labour-intensive manual packaging that is required when you do your two-step production with it. So, in short, we are making the production process more efficient. It means that Indian cable manufacturers will become more competitive in the world marketplace to be able to efficiently deliver and export cables.”
