“A shed like ours”: Achievements of the Bestec GmbH
“Located in the new Berlin-Adlershof Science and Technology Park, the company Bestec GmbH has been awarded a nuclear fusion research order amounting to one million Deutschmark.“ Totalling 83 words, this brief announcement in the trade journal “Handelsblatt” of 18 February 1993 was not only a milestone for the recently founded company Bestec, but also the first million Deutschmark order awarded to a company in the likewise recently founded science and technology park in Adlershof.
At that time the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics commissioned a measuring instrument for tests involving controlled nuclear fusion. This project of 1993 is still opening many doors today. “It is still a remarkable achievement and one of the best references,” explained Rainer Hammerschmidt, founder and managing director of Bestec GmbH. The company specialises in tailored vacuum systems for coating, analysis and special applications. It took a lot of courage to put one’s trust in “a shed like ours”. At the time Bestec had five employees, and they were faced with competition from the Zeiss Group and two other renowned companies.
Bestec was hived off the Centre for Scientific Instruments of the GDR Academy of Sciences. The institute focused on laser, vacuum, and optical measuring technologies. Everything the GDR could not buy on the world market had to be “homegrown” here. Hammerschmidt described the step into independence as only logical. In the wake of Reunification all scientific institutes of the former GDR were subjected to an evaluation. “Our institute,” recalled Hammerschmidt, “did not have a counterpart in the West German research landscape. Nobody knew what to do with us, so the institute was liquidated.”
Developed while the Academy was still operating, a camera was the company’s first bestseller at a trade fair in England. “They stared at us in astonishment,” recalled Hammerschmidt. Nevertheless, “there was a lot of nervousness,” admitted the managing director, because none of the startup aids usual today were then available. Projects were financed from the first sales. The banks were only “hard to convince”. A business partner organised the presentation at the Max Planck Institute. “The rest was luck,” confessed Hammerschmidt. “Our skills corresponded to the institute’s interests.” The first successful project was followed by the call for tenders amounting to one million Deutschmark. “We had already worked intensively with the contents, which no doubt was why we won.” – “And we were far too cheap,” he added mischievously. Later he learned that the competitor Zeiss had demanded ten times as much. “The D mark was new, and we had ‘zero experience’ of what competition did or how engineering services were evaluated,” confessed Hammerschmidt.
Today Bestec is grounded in the free market economy and operates successfully all over the world. Now numbering 22, the employees at Bestec have always remained true to their maxim: “We don’t make promises just to get an order, even when we are constantly scraping the limits of physics.” This is a concept that convinces. Just recently the company handled a 2.5 million Euro order for the former competitor Zeiss – a unique.
by Rico Bigelmann