AL-KO KOBER GROUP, Großkötz

Großkötz is a village in Bavaria’s Swabian region. In 1931, Alois Kober, 23 years old, founded a locksmithery. Over the following decades, Kober and his descendants used courage and entrepreneurial esprit to turn the little locksmithery into the AL-KO KOBER group. It operates on a worldwide scale. Its 51 facilities are located on five continents and employ more than 4,000 people. Running this role model of a family-run company is the third generation of Kobers--Roland, Harald, Raymond and Stefan Kober.

The company’s range of products include high-end garden choppers and air conditioners. AL-KO is also a supplier of high-performance technologies for RVs (recreational vehicles). AL-KO’s garden devices are sold at specialists’ stores. These devices include a large number of lawnmowers and tractors. Among the latter is the Silver 470 E, which won in 2007 the prestigious red dot design award. The company’s air conditioners and ventilators are used in everything from cooling small-sized facilities to maintaining air temperatures and quality in operating rooms. AL-KO also supplies damping, suction and plastics processing technologies.

The name AL-KO is especially well-known among owners of RVs and other mobile homes, thanks to its AMC chassis, which are incorporated into a wide variety of RVs and of commercial vehicles. These chassis feature light-gauge technologies and configurable wheelbases enabling a diversity of layouts. These in turn form the basis of AL-KO’s “ready to complete” chassis-based systems, which are designed and built to meet customers’ needs. Easy to configure and to extend—these qualities characterize all of the systems provided by AL-KO. This extendibility is provided by such chassis add-ons as load carriers and bicycle racks.
Today’s AL-KO may look completely different than Alois Kober’s little locksmithery. Shared by many of Bavaria’s family-run companies, AL-KO’s policies of caring for its employees, for its hometown, for its customers, and for the world around it have remained, however, the same. Going by the name “corporate social responsibility”, these policies manifest themselves in the group’s sustained support of cultural and social projects undertaken in its home area and elsewhere. These policies, in turn, explain the strong sense of identification shown its staff with the group. These staff members include those working in its production facilities and those sitting on its boards of management.

To express its intention of setting forth this tradition, the group has coined a new slogan: “Quality for life”. The term ‘quality’ refers to the comfort, security and pleasure of operation experienced by users.