You are Ines Brenner, head of Vossberg Mess- und Regeltechnik, a EUR 720 million industrial-sensor maker in Stuttgart. Your largest customer of nineteen years has just left for a cheaper, less accurate sensor sold with a subscription. Before you divide a EUR 60 million envelope, you have to tell the board where the value in your industry is moving.
The situation
Vossberg, founded in 1962 and part of the Kirchner engineering group, makes sensors, flow meters and control equipment for chemical, food and water-treatment plants. It employs 3,100 people and closed 2025 with EUR 720 million of revenue and EUR 115 million of operating profit, a 16% margin. 84% of revenue comes from hardware: instruments sold once, installed for a decade and serviced under calibration contracts. Its gross margin is 38%, after losing two to three points a year for three years.
On 21 April 2026 you lost Rheinaue Wasserwerke: EUR 43 million a year, 6% of revenue and the reference account in every tender. It went to Talvi Systems, whose sensors are, by your own laboratory's measurements, less accurate and cheaper, but come with a subscription that tells the utility which pumps are about to fail. Firms like Talvi buy commodity sensors, sell them near cost and earn 60% to 75% gross margin on the analytics. Two more large accounts are evaluating the same competitor.
Group chief executive Georg Halbach has given you EUR 60 million for two years, two quarters to present the plan, and not a euro or a month more. Hanne Ostermann, who runs the sensor core, wants the money to take cost out of the instrument and sell more calibration. Marek Sattler of Digital Ventures (28 people, EUR 9 million a year, inside the hardware profit-and-loss account) wants it for the analytics layer. Your bonus moves with the hardware, and calibration is the business you built. Nothing forces your hand this year: orders are steady and the 16% will hold.