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

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.

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

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.