
The first years
TUPY’s history is closely linked to the history
of industrialization in Brazil and to the history of the
city of Joinville, colonized as from the second half of
the19th century by European immigrants, mostly from Germany.
Albano Schmidt, Hermann Metz and Arno Schwarz, who founded
Tupy on March 9, 1938, descended from those immigrants.
Albano was a business man and his partners, people who
had already been manufacturing iron artifacts, using rudimental
foundry knowledge.
Ten years before Tupy was founded,
Albano had challenged his companions to discover “the
formula of the malleable cast iron”, used in
the production of pipe fittings, which, until then,
had always been imported. With no laboratory resources
or manuals that might give some sort of hint on how
to get to the formula of that alloy (originally discovered
in 1630 in England), everything was carried out on
a trial-and-error basis, until 1937, when |

Load
of pipe fittings in barrels for sea transportation |
| they obtained the correct
composition. In the following year, in the facilities
of an existing workshop downtown Joinville, the first
pipe fittings with the TUPY brand started to be manufactured.
Three years later, they received the similarity certification,
which meant that they were similar to the imported
ones. |
The entrepreneuring vision
| While the pipe fittings were conquering
the market all over Brazil and becoming sales leaders,
Albano Schmidt planned the construction of what was
to become the Boa Vista Industrial Plant. The transference
to the new plant began in 1954. The new facilities
gave a boost to the beginning of the suburb itself,
presently one of the most populated in the city. The
first foundry unit, with annual production capacity
of three thousand tonnes, soon transformed TUPY in
the largest company in the state of Santa Catarina. |

Aerial view of TUPY in 1954 |
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Aerial view of TUPY Technical
School |
Albano Schmidt died in 1958 and his office was occupied
by his 26-year-old son Hans Dieter Schmidt, already
seen by his dad as his natural successor. A man with
modern ideas and entrepreneurial vision, Dieter created,
in 1959, the Tupy Technical High-School, with the purpose
of qualifying man power to face the challenges that
he believed would come along with the automotive industry. |
| The first contract for the production
of automotive parts had been signed in 1958: brake
drums for the recently established in Brazil Volkswagen. |
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| In 1963, the second foundry unit was installed, exclusively
for the production of automotive parts and, in 1972,
the first Research Center was created in a partnership
with the São Paulo University Polytechnic School.
In 1975, a third venture materialized the company’s
vocation to be a player in the automotive sector. Dedicated
to the production of engine blocks and heads, that
unit is responsible, presently, for 50% of the company’s
businesses. |
 One of the products for the
Brazilian automotive industry:
brake drums |
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The premature death of Dieter Schmidt in an airplane accident
in 1981, when he was the State Industry Secretary, and
the excessive diversification of the group, which, besides
the metal-mechanical sectors, also had businesses in the
chemical and plastics sectors, almost lead Tupy to close
its doors.
The present days
A professional management started in 1991 and, in 1995,
TUPY’s shares began to be controlled by a pool of
pension funds and banks, a capital solution found in order
to face the serious indebtedness.
Already focused on its core-business, foundry, the company concentrated
all its efforts to increase exports and consolidate itself in the international
market as a global player in the automotive industry. In 1998, it acquired
a foundry manufacturing plant in Mauá, state of São Paulo,
and modernized and expanded the Joinville plant. Soon, it doubled its
production capacity and, presently, it is among the five largest foundries
in the world.
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