Putzmeister Brand Guidelines: Karl Schlecht’s Plaster Machine Maker and Its Concrete Pumps

A student, his father’s trade and a mortar machine.

Putzmeister is German for “plaster master,” as English Wikipedia notes, and the name records where the company began: with plaster, not concrete. German Wikipedia says Karl Schlecht, the son of a master plasterer, founded the business in 1958 at Bernhausen, now part of Filderstadt, while still a student at the technical university in Stuttgart. It was called KS-Maschinenbau and made plastering machines. The first machine, built for his father’s business, became the subject of his diploma thesis. A company statement reported by Middle East Construction News in 2018 says he started out from his father’s garage.

The name came a few years later. The company’s timeline places the change to Putzmeister-Werk Maschinenfabrik GmbH in 1961, alongside the first section of a factory at Filderstadt, near Stuttgart airport, while German Wikipedia gives 1963. In 1965 came the Gypsomat, which the company calls the world’s first automatic, continuously working plaster machine for gypsum plaster.

Concrete followed quickly. The timeline records a hydraulically driven concrete pump in 1967, and the 2018 company statement describes a two-cylinder piston pump with a flapper system in 1969, which it says was new to the market. The move to Aichtal, south of Stuttgart, came in 1971, when the production plant opened there and, the company says, it delivered its 1,000th concrete pump. German Wikipedia dates the start of truck-mounted pump building to the same site and year. Branches in France, Italy, Spain, Great Britain and Brazil followed in 1974. In 1980 the company added tunnelling machines as a fourth product group, and in 1982 it acquired Thomsen, Inc., which German Wikipedia describes as a former world leader in truck-mounted pumps, to form Putzmeister America.

A history told in metres.

The company’s timeline reads largely as a list of heights. It claims a world record in high-rise concrete pumping of 310 metres at the Frankfurt telecommunications tower in 1977, which the 2018 statement says brought international recognition. It then records 340 metres over a 600-metre distance at the St Gotthard tunnel in 1978, and 532 metres at the Riva del Garda power station in Italy in 1994. On the Burj Khalifa, sources give different figures: the company’s timeline records 601 metres in 2007, when the tower was still the Burj Dubai, while German Wikipedia, citing the Nürtinger Zeitung of April 2008, gives 606 metres on 9 April 2008. German Wikipedia adds that no higher pumping was needed because the top of the tower is a steel structure.

Boom length is the other measure the company keeps. The timeline lists a boom of almost 50 metres in 1982 and a 62-metre boom in 1986, each described there as the largest in the world at delivery, and German Wikipedia records the first truck-mounted pump with a 70-metre boom in 2008. The company’s model names carry this logic into the product itself: the BSF truck-mounted pumps and BSA trailer pumps use letters and numbers, as in the BSF67-5 launched at bauma in Munich in 2025. Other names are more playful. The “Shotcrete Buffalo” of 1983 was a wet shotcrete machine for tunnels, known in German as the Spritzbüffel.

The range now goes well beyond pumps. Putzmeister’s website lists concrete pumps, truck mixers, stationary placing booms, mortar machines, environmental and mining pumps, and tunnelling machines. The company says it began producing batching plants in 2015, which made it a full-range supplier. German Wikipedia says these come from Goa in India, and that Madrid builds the Wetkret tunnel spraying machines and the Mixkret low-profile mixers. Several recent launches are electric or hybrid. The company lists the iONTRON hybrid pump series on sale in 2021, the all-electric iONTRON eMixer in 2023, and in 2025 the eBSF42-5, which it calls the world’s first fully electric truck-mounted concrete pump. It also says it won the bauma Innovation Award in two categories in 2007.

How road and concrete machinery makers present themselves.

Road and concrete machinery rarely sits still for a portrait, so its makers tend to photograph it at work. Catalogues and trade-press images return to a few scenes: a paver laying a black mat at dusk under its own lights, a line of tandem rollers working in formation behind it, a milling drum shown in close-up with its picks exposed, a screed drawn in cutaway so the parts that shape the surface can be seen. The subject is the finished road as much as the machine that lays it.

Concrete makers have their own set pieces. A truck-mounted pump is shown with its boom unfolded over a high-rise site, section by section, so that the vehicle reads as a piece of the building work. Truck mixers are lined up in brand colours, and the drum becomes a large painted surface for a maker’s colours.

Trade fairs are the other stage. bauma, now held in Munich, dates from 1949 and last opened in April 2025; CONEXPO-CON/AGG and World of Concrete both meet in Las Vegas, and INTERMAT in Paris has run under that name since 1988. Machines are launched at these shows, and a fair can date a whole generation of a range: Vögele, for one, presented its “Dash 2” pavers at Bauma 2007.

Behind that shared visual language, ownership has changed. Family firms have been bought and brought together, and several of the names in this guide now belong to larger groups, and each entry sets out who founded the brand, who owns it today, where it says its machines are made and what can be documented about how it looks.

A German name in a Chinese group.

The founding era ended with a sale. On 30 January 2012 Agence France-Presse reported that Sany Heavy Industry and the Chinese private equity group Citic would acquire all of Putzmeister, and KHL reported the same day that the shares had belonged to Karl Schlecht’s foundations. Putzmeister said it would keep “a high degree of independence” in day-to-day management, with Sany focusing on China, where Putzmeister would remain the premium brand. KHL reported that Aichtal would become Sany’s headquarters for concrete machinery outside China. Sany’s stake reached 100 per cent the next year: the Chinese daily First Financial Daily reported on 2 July 2013 that a Sany subsidiary had bought the remaining 10 per cent.

The group has since reshaped where things are made. German Wikipedia says Putzmeister bought the truck mixer maker Intermix of Heimertingen, Bavaria, in 2012, and the company says it acquired its long-standing Slovenian supplier ITAS-CAS in 2022. German Wikipedia says Intermix stopped production in February 2025 and that truck mixers will in future be made only at Kočevje in Slovenia. The Hessian broadcaster’s hessenschau reported on 20 November 2024 that the steel component plant at Gründau would close at the end of 2025, a year later than first planned, with production moving to Turkey; German Wikipedia records the closure. Aichtal remains the base. The company’s site gives it as the home of Putzmeister Holding GmbH and says Putzmeister Concrete Pumps GmbH there produces and sells truck-mounted and stationary pumps, placing booms and truck mixers. The timeline also says the company opened a manufacturing hub in Shanghai in 1996 and set up in Mexico in 2014 to produce truck mixers.

The two brands sit side by side. The company says that since 2020 it has sold SANY truck-mounted concrete pumps as a second brand in selected European countries and in the United States, and its website links to “Sany Group” in the company menu while keeping the Putzmeister name in front.

For a design guide, Putzmeister shows how a trade word can outlast its first product: a name meaning plaster master still heads a company known for concrete pumps, and it stayed in place after a change of owner. Compare its parent SANY and the Italian pump maker CIFA. For this guide we use boom steel, wet plaster and ochre with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Putzmeister’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.