Denmark’s Fiberline Composites (Middelfart; www.fiberline.com) and German building components and systems supplier Schöck (Baden-Baden; www.schoek.de) have formed a joint venture that is intended to widen the use of glass fibre for reinforcing concrete. The managing director of the new company is Thomas Stürzl.

The two companies have worked together for more than 15 years, creating "Combar" glass fibre-reinforced concrete at the start of the new millennium. Since then, Combar has increasingly grown its market share and the partners have decided to expand production.

The joint venture, in which Schöck will hold 75% and Fiberline 25%, plans to build a new plant in Halle / Germany for startup in 2019. Until then, overall Combar production will continue in Middelfart, but will be gradually reduced once the plant goes online in favour of other products for which Fiberline is seeing particularly strong demand, such as reinforcement profiles for wind turbine blades, profiles for windows, doors and façades, and structural profiles for load-bearing constructions.

As well as manufacturing Combar, Fiberline markets and sells the product in North America, while Schöck is responsible for marketing and sales in the rest of the world. Fiberline Composites employs 300 people at its headquarters in Denmark, and has a production facility in China and a sales office in Canada.

Apart from reinforcement technology, Schöck also produces solutions for thermal and sound insulation. The company has a workforce of around 800 employees in Europe, Russia and North America.