Since taking over as CEO of Bühler Group at the start of 2026, Samuel Schär has built on more than 24 years of experience within the company, including over ten years as a member of the Group Executive Board. He views his appointment not as a conventional leadership handover, but as a natural extension of Bühler’s deeply rooted corporate culture.
A strong focus on continuity has long defined Bühler’s approach. Now 166 years old, the company remains family-owned and is managed by its fifth generation. Schär is the seventh CEO in Bühler’s history and only the third to come from outside the founding family. This long-term perspective is equally reflected in the company’s relationships with its customers. Approximately 70 percent of Bühler’s customers are family-owned businesses, many of which have worked with the company across multiple generations. As a result, understanding the way these companies make decisions, invest, and plan for the future is considered especially important, particularly at a time of significant industrial transformation.
How the Global Die Casting Industry Is Evolving
The interview highlights that the global die casting industry is experiencing a period of far-reaching change. Although the market is under considerable pressure, it is also opening up new technological and economic prospects. In Bühler’s view, the sector must adapt not only through technological innovation, but also by transforming its structures and corporate mindset.
The market has undergone substantial change in recent years. In the conventional segment for small and medium locking force machines, many regions continue to struggle with excess capacity and restrained investment activity. At the same time, demand for large structural casting applications has accelerated rapidly, driven primarily by the rise of electromobility and the need for new vehicle architectures based on highly integrated structural components.
As a result, large front and rear underbody castings, battery housings, and other complex structural components are increasingly replacing assemblies consisting of numerous individual parts. This trend is fueling a worldwide transition toward mega- and gigacasting technologies.
Bühler identified this development at an early stage and introduced machines with locking forces of more than 4,400 tons in 2019. Since then, the company reports that it has sold more than 50 of these large-scale systems, with a combined value exceeding CHF 500 million. From a strategic perspective, this expansion into the large structural casting segment has been decisive. Without it, Bühler’s die casting business would have come under much greater pressure as vehicle production volumes remained stagnant.
Efficiency Over Scale: A Shift in Die Casting Priorities
At Bühler, the future of die casting is not viewed as a simple race toward ever-larger machines. Instead, Schär emphasizes that long-term success will depend less on maximizing machine size and more on the ability to produce components in an economical, reliable, and efficient manner.
As machine and system dimensions grow, the complexity of surrounding processes increases as well. Peripherals, robotics, logistics, and process control all become more challenging. For this reason, Bühler follows a different path than some of its competitors. Rather than concentrating solely on scaling up machine size, the company focuses on enabling the production of large, high-quality structural parts on comparatively smaller systems. This is achieved through intelligent process control, optimized tooling, advanced alloys, and technologies such as rheocasting.
From Bühler’s perspective, this approach represents the more economically sustainable solution in the long run.
The interview further underscores how large structural casting is transforming the broader market landscape. Investments in modern megacasting cells require significant capital and are often only feasible for OEMs or financially strong Tier-1 suppliers. At the same time, supply chain structures are evolving: due to the size and handling constraints of large structural castings, transportation and storage are becoming increasingly difficult, which is driving production closer to vehicle assembly sites.
Consequently, the role of traditional foundries is changing. Medium-sized, family-owned die casting companies operating conventional machine fleets may find it increasingly difficult to compete in the megacasting segment, while OEMs and major suppliers are progressively investing directly in the technology themselves.
How China’s Pace Is Reshaping Global Markets
Bühler is closely observing developments in China, where recent years have seen substantial investment in new production facilities and large-scale casting capacities. The market is characterized by remarkable speed and a strong willingness to invest, even though it is also marked by significant overcapacities and intense competitive pressure. Despite these challenges, Bühler views China as an important driver of technological progress and industrial dynamism, offering valuable impulses and lessons for the global industry.
Expanding Beyond Automotive Applications
Despite ongoing weakness in the European market, Bühler maintains a positive long-term outlook for die casting. Beyond structural and large-scale casting applications, the company identifies additional growth opportunities in highly stressed components such as suspension parts, brake calipers, and wheels.
Looking further into the future, entirely new application fields may also emerge outside the traditional automotive industry, including humanoid robotics and drones. Once production volumes in these sectors reach sufficient scale, die casting is expected to benefit from its economic strengths as a highly efficient manufacturing process.
Artificial Intelligence as a Key Enabler in Die Casting
A further key theme of the discussion is the increasing relevance of digitalization and artificial intelligence. Bühler sees AI as offering significant opportunities for the future development of die casting.
AI-based systems are already being used to support mold and tool design by enabling more precise simulation of thermal processes and helping to reduce scrap rates. Even greater potential is anticipated in the areas of process control and system monitoring.
Die casting remains a complex and, at times, unstable process that depends heavily on operator expertise. At the same time, demographic change and labor shortages are creating growing challenges for foundries worldwide. In this context, AI-driven assistance systems could help stabilize production processes, identify defects at an earlier stage, and enable predictive maintenance. In the long term, the vision points toward a gradual shift to highly automated “push-button production,” even if this level of automation is still some distance away.
More Courage in Europe
With regard to Europe, Schär delivers a clear message: the industry must distinguish itself through innovation and technological leadership. Orders will not simply return on their own, as the sector is currently undergoing a consolidation phase. Companies that aim to remain competitive in the long term will need to set themselves apart through technology. He also highlights increasingly challenging industrial conditions in Europe. Germany in particular continues to benefit from highly skilled engineers and technicians but often faces difficulties in translating these strengths into globally competitive industrial structures.
Schär places particular emphasis on cultural dimensions of competitiveness. He repeatedly underlines that Europe requires greater entrepreneurial ambition and a stronger willingness to perform if it wants to maintain its international competitiveness. From his perspective, examples such as Bühler employees’ response following the Swiss franc shock in 2015, or staff in China who voluntarily stayed inside factories during COVID-19 lockdowns to ensure production continuity, illustrate differing mindsets and work cultures. According to Schär, Europe remains fully capable in technological terms, but must pursue competitiveness with the same determination and consistency seen in other regions of the world.
Overall, the Bühler CEO presents a nuanced but far from pessimistic view of the industry. Die casting is undergoing a historic transformation. Electromobility, megacasting, new materials, digitalization, and artificial intelligence are fundamentally reshaping technologies, market structures, and business models. At the same time, new applications and growth markets are emerging. For companies like Bühler, long-term success will depend on continuously driving innovation, making processes smarter, and clearly differentiating themselves through technology. “The future of die casting is far from over,” Samuel Schär concludes. “But it will become more demanding, more international, and more innovation-driven than ever before.”
About the Bühler Group
The Bühler Group is one of the world’s leading technology companies in die casting equipment and process solutions for the metals and automotive industries, as well as in food and feed processing technologies. The Swiss family-owned company develops and manufactures highly automated die casting machines, peripheral systems, and digital solutions used in the production of complex lightweight metal components.
A central focus of Bühler Group is structural and large-scale casting applications for the automotive sector. The company is considered one of the technological pioneers in the field of mega- and gigacasting and has been supplying large casting machines with locking forces of more than 4,400 tons since 2019.
On a global scale, Bühler Group is benefiting in particular from the automotive industry’s ongoing shift toward electromobility. In parallel, the company identifies further growth opportunities in emerging application areas such as suspension components, wheels, robotics, and drone technologies.
Through its combination of mechanical engineering expertise, automation, digitalization, and international market presence, Bühler Group is widely regarded as one of the key innovation drivers in the global die casting industry.
