At the beginning of October the Ford Motor Company, USA awarded orders totaling some DM350 million (approx. Euro180 million) to the mechanical engineering firm Hüller Hille / Cross Hüller (Hüller Hille GmbH, Ludwigsburg, Cross Hüller North America, Sterling Heights USA, Cross Hüller, Knowsley GB).

The orders are for the production, delivery and commissioning of transfer lines and machining centers for the manufacture of the new Ford V8 engine at Ford's Windsor, Canada plant. 650,000 engine blocks and 1.3 million cylinder heads are to be manufactured at the plant from 2001/2002 using Hüller Hille / Cross Hüller equipment. In addition to two complete transfer lines, these orders include a total of 172 machines from the successful "Specht" agile system series.

Part of ThyssenKrupp's Production Systems segment, the Hüller Hille group has production facilities in Germany, the UK and the USA. With the market depressed throughout the machine tool sector, the Hüller-Hille group's performance on this market in the recently ended 1999/2000 fiscal year was less than satisfactory. In response to this, the restructuring measures already initiated have been expanded into a worldwide reorganization program for the machine tool operations. All measures will have been implemented by the end of the year, and the new structure will therefore have a significant impact on the recently started 2000/2001 fiscal year. The mechanical engineering specialists see the Ford orders as confirmation of their strategy and expect successful consolidation in a world market which continues to be difficult.

Production Systems is home to ThyssenKrupp's worldwide mechanical engineering activities in this field. The Machine Tools, Assembly Equipment and Body-in-White Systems units bring together innovative potential and expertise in the manufacture of high-tech capital goods, special machinery, lines and complete systems, primarily for the automotive sector. As the world's biggest supplier of machine tools with a workforce of over 8,000 employees, Production Systems generated sales of 1.3 billion euros in fiscal 1998/99.