Universal Robots Names New President

Universal Robots A/S (UR; Odense, Denmark), a Teradyne, Inc. (North Reading, MA) company and a global leader in the collaborative robot market, has named Jürgen von Hollen as their president. He succeeds Enrico Krog Iversen, who relinquished the post in June 2016 to pursue other interests.

von Hollen was most recently the executive president of the Engineering Solutions Division, which includes the Automation and Controls business of Bilfinger SE (Mannheim, Germany), a leading international engineering and services company. In his role there, he was responsible for a global staff of nearly 10,000 and annual sales in excess of €1.0 billion. His career began with Daimler-Benz aerospace and he held senior management roles at Daimler-Chrysler Services, Deutsche Telecom and Pentair.

“We’re delighted to have Jürgen leading UR through this period of explosive growth,” stated Mark Jagiela, the chief executive officer of Teradyne. “His experience in developing and leading global teams that serve a broad range of industrial and commercial customers is tremendously important as we drive the adoption of easy to use, safe and economical Cobots across the globe.”

“I am excited to join this company as we work to fundamentally reshape automation across the global economy,” stated von Hollen. “The opportunity to lead and expand a high-powered organization like this with such a long term, high growth outlook is very rare, and I look forward to working with our worldwide distributors, partners and customers in the days ahead to realize the full potential of collaborative robots.”

UR is the result of many years of intensive research at Denmark’s successful robot cluster located in Odense. The company was co-founded in 2005 by chief technology officer Esben Østergaard, who wanted to make robot technology accessible to all by developing small, user-friendly, reasonably priced, flexible industrial robots that are safe to work with and on their own can be used to streamline processes in the industry. Their product portfolio now includes the collaborative UR3, UR5 and UR10 robotic arms named after their payload in kilos.

Since their first robot launched in December 2008, the company has experienced considerable growth with the user-friendly robots now sold in more than 50 countries worldwide. At just 195 days, the average payback period for their robots is the fastest in the industry. UR has subsidiaries and regional offices in the U.S., Spain, Germany, Singapore, Czech Republic, India, and China, with more than 300 employees worldwide.

Teradyne is a leading supplier of automation equipment for test and industrial applications. Teradyne Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) is used to test semiconductors, wireless products, data storage and complex electronic systems, which serve consumer, communications, industrial and government customers. Their Industrial Automation products include Collaborative Robots used by global manufacturing and light industrial customers to improve quality and increase manufacturing efficiency. In 2015, the company had revenue of $1.64 billion and currently employs approximately 4,200 people worldwide.

www.universalrobots.com,  www.teradyne.com