History

At its heart, the history of Loesche GmbH is a story of excellence. This story begins in 1906, when Curt von Grueber returned from a trip to the United States with the European sales rights to the brand new Kent mill. The Kent mill ofered producers a grinding capacity of up to 5 tonnes per hour. 

The company later acquired the European sales rights for the Maxecon mill, which took the benefts of the Kent mill a step further with the addition of an air classifer and a redesign of the grinding components. Though there was defnitely room for improvement in the design, it was immensely popular and by 1918 the company had sold more than 600 mills to both the cement and fertiliser industries, with the latter using the mill to crush phosphate.

In the 1920s, Ernst Curt Loesche, who joined the company in 1912 and became co-owner.

With advances in the pyro process enabling capacities of up to 3000 tonnes per day by the end of the 1960s, mill manufacturers needed to increase grinding capacity from around 120 tonnes per hour to upwards of 200 tonnes per hour. In 1971, Loesche answered this call with a revolutionary mill arrangement that went against a design principle that had lasted almost 40 years.

The first four-roller mill went into operation in a plant near Naples in Italy in 1971 with a raw meal throughput of 214 tonnes per hour. With an increase in the size of the rollers and the grinding table, throughput of 425 tonnes per hour was achieved when the next generation was launched in 1975.

In the 1990s, Loesche made another world record delivery with the sale of a 750 tph raw material mill to a customer in Thailand. 

When Thomas Loesche took over management in 1983, he was determined that the company should be an environmental leader. Under his guidance, Loesche GmbH has introduced a variety of environmentally friendly technologies, perhaps the most popular of which is the vertical roller mill for grinding slag.

In the early 1990s, yet another ground-breaking mill design in the form of the 2+2 cement clinker mill. As was the case with previous Loesche innovations, this mill proved a resounding success around the world. In the years that followed, Loesche GmbH expanded its range of products and services and invested heavily in the development of new technology. The collapse of economies in South-East Asia in 1997 plunged the company into a deep crisis. However, new ideas and the introduction of a series of rationalisation measures enabled the company to recover.

Two of the innovations that date from this period are the slide-in procedure and the introduction of the so-called ‘redundancy concept’. By the time demand picked up again in 2003, Loesche had an impressive range of products that included state-of-the-art mills. Very soon, the company was once again world leader in its field.

At LOESCHE quality is important. The continous development of the processes and the quality management has been examined every 3 years since 1998. In May 2009 the certificate was prolonged until 2012 by the internationally renowned certifier Lloyd`s Register Quality Assurance (LRQA). Basis of this certification is the revision of ISO 9001:2008 valid since December 2008.

The largest mills in the world, the LOESCHE Mill Type LM 69.4 and LM 69.6 with product throughputs of up to 1200 t/h were sold 14 times throughout the world.

The 300th Loesche Mill for grinding cement and granulated blast furnace slag was sold worldwide.