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German manufacturer of licence plates From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Erich Utsch AG is a manufacturing company headquartered in Siegen, Germany.[2] It was founded in 1961 as a family business and sold to external investors in 2016. Utsch is specialized in vehicle registration and identification,[3] particularly license plates.[4]
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Company type | Private |
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Industry | Manufacturing |
Founded | 1961 |
Founder | Erich Utsch |
Headquarters | , Germany |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people |
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Products | Vehicle license plates |
Revenue | ![]() |
Number of employees | ![]() |
Website | utsch |
In 1961 Erich Utsch founded a company to produce license plates.[5] He saw a business opportunity in the increasing motorization of the post-war period. During the very first years, Utsch used a converted wine press; later, the company developed specialized presses.[6] After Utsch died in 1969, his son Manfred took over management. He invested in new technologies and gradually entered foreign markets. As of the 2015 fiscal year, 80% of all revenues came from outside Germany.[7]
2001, Utsch changed its legal structure from Kommanditgesellschaft (KG) to Aktiengesellschaft (AG). Until 2016, the founder family retained a majority stake in the company. Then Manfred Utsch sold the company to Australian and Swedish investors.[8][9]
In 2020, Utsch merged with Hill Numberplates, a manufacturer with major activities in the United Kingdom and France and a presence in parts of Asia, and Africa. The merger resulted in the world's largest license plate group.[10]
Utsch is a private German stock corporation. The Erich Utsch AG is the group's parent, with a dozen fully consolidated subsidiaries in several countries, including France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The LicenSys Australasia Pty. Ltd. is a semi-independent subgroup of Utsch, being responsible for the Asia-Pacific markets.[11]
The company's core business is the production of vehicle license plates.[12] Utsch supports various country-specific security features such as emblems, laser codes, watermarks, or holograms.[13]
Besides the production of license plates, Utsch sells machines, tools, and other equipment for related production and distribution processes.[6] These include blocking and counter-pressure tools, embossing presses, hot stamping machines, laminators, and laser coding equipment.[14]
Customers include governments from countries from around the world.[15] The government of Italy, for example, commissioned Utsch in 1998 to handle the conversion of license plates to new EU standards;[16] the company supplied millions of official license plates in to Egypt and Iraq in 2008.[17][18]
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