In 1990, a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rainer Roth realised his vision of founding his own company. He drove his Trabant to the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Nuremberg, where he collected the addresses of two thousand injection mould and tool making companies. Hoping that they might offer him a helping hand, he contacted all two thousand addresses – and eventually received a promising response. This laid the foundations of the roth company. He set off to introduce himself in person.

In the spring of 1990, plans for the new company began to take shape: in the children’s bedroom of Roth’s parents’ home in Auma-Weidatal, Thuringia. It was an exciting period full of hopes, dreams and challenges.

_{Children's room in the Roth family home and destruction of the house.}

Construction work on the first hall was already underway by the autumn of 1990. The hall rose on the site of Roth’s parents’ house and garden. In order to come up with the initial investment, considerable sacrifices had to be made: Rainer Roth sold his beloved collection of historic tractors. This helped to fund, amongst other things, a liquid gas tank and the necessary wastewater infrastructure.

As the hall was taking shape, Rainer Roth trained his future workforce on the machinery they would be using. Programmers and designers were also in place from day one. Right from the start, very ambitious standards were set: for instance, instead of the customary drawing boards, staff sat at computers with 2D drawings in AutoCAD.

The first machinery was commissioned in May 1991. roth initially manufactured tools for the automobile, TV and photographic industries as well as shell moulds for the Schubert company. To improve the quality of its products, hot-casting rather than cold-casting methods were used. The first master craftsman was recruited in 1992.

A few years later – in 1996 – it became possible to buy the two former pigsties behind the first hall. They were in a poor condition, however, so the only option was to raze them to the ground and replace them with new halls. Following this second phase of construction, roth was now in a position to manage a tool-making weight of five tonnes.

roth continued its steady growth in the early 21st century, and the switch to 3D drawings began. However, the machines had teething troubles when it came to handling these, so initially the free-form drawings had to be converted by a specialist company. The company then developed its own (float switch) software solution for the files, which enabled the machines to cope with them problem-free.

Today, roth Werkzeugbau is one of the leading complete service providers for ready-to-use mould and tooling solutions in Germany, with a clientele from around the world. In order to keep delivery and response times to a minimum, some 100 employees work 24/7 in shifts. Thanks to our ultra-modern machinery, we can manufacture products with an impressive degree of vertical integration, high-precision output, and a minimal error rate. Our technical centre, which is unparalleled anywhere in Europe, is equipped for everything from functional tests to the design qualification phase and representation of the processes required for series production, including automation.