The path to the past requires local knowledge. In the rather unobtrusive Magura headquarters from the sixties lies the loophole to the company's history, hidden behind a large photocopier. A fire door, a spiral staircase, another fire door, another narrow, crooked staircase leads further up. Then light bulbs under the roof beams illuminate a dusty corridor. Behind it, a door opens, half blocked by roller shutter cabinets positioned crosswise. If you push them aside, you can see 125 years of Magura, written down in metal: throttle handles, brake levers, levers for snow blowers, small pumps and tank gauges the size of wristwatches lie on metal shelves. Small, partly handwritten tags with inventory numbers are visibly damaged by the storage climate. And somewhere in between is a secret star of bicycle technology gathering dust: a sample of the first ever hydraulic bicycle brake - the Magura Hydrostop, or HS for short.
Magura Hydrostop - the first hydraulic bicycle brake
Long before the disc brake became established on sporty bikes, it marked the state of the art for decades. It is an ingenious transfer of technology: the brand had already been producing a braking system with two hydraulic pistons that press a friction surface onto a brake disc for a long time - as a disc brake for BMW motorbikes. However, nobody had previously thought of designing the whole thing in such a way that it would grip a bicycle rim instead of a steel disc. The idea quickly took off on mountain bikes, which were booming at the time, before arriving on trekking and e-bikes. The "HS" established the Swabians on the global bicycle market. And it is still "made in Germany" - quite deliberately.
Magura is a classic German medium-sized company with specialised high-end products, clean industrial buildings, a few hundred employees and a name that refers to the founder: Gustav Magenwirth, Urach. The fact that the current managing scion of the founding family is not called Fabian Magenwirth, but Fabian Auch, is simply due to the family tree. The company founder had no son, so the surname was lost on the married daughters.
Loyalty to the location for generations
"Magura is socially embedded in the region. We are now in the fourth generation of production here and would like to do the same in the fifth, sixth and seventh generation," says Auch, the great-grandson of the founder. And he adds: "It's good to be able to access a large part of the supply chain. It's also about the predictability of delivery commitments." And so loyalty to the location is also an issue that played into Magura's hands during the corona-related turbulence: the industry leader Shimano was experiencing major problems in the brake sector, with many customers switching to Magura. It is undisputed that Magura brakes also contain bought-in parts and that some of the production takes place abroad. However, the heart of the brand undoubtedly beats in the triangle between the three sites in Bad Urach, Hengen and Hülben.
In Hülben, you can watch the heartbeat without being in the way of too many people. An architecturally negligible factory building in the centre of the town. Inside: 40 plastic injection moulding machines. Above, on a gallery: a tangle of hoses, intertwined like half a dozen octopuses in rugby. Accelerated by compressed air, the granules of a total of 140 types of plastic buzz through the hoses to become almost everything a brake is made of. Seals, wiper rings, pistons, levers, grips - Magura can produce around a thousand different plastic parts here. Most of these are puzzle pieces for bicycle or motorbike brakes.
Production sites
The fact that production in the expensive Swabian region is competitive is due to the high degree of automation and the sophisticated process. Plastics such as the carbon fibre-reinforced "Carbotecture" can replace metal. And the parts that clatter out of the complex machines into collection containers are "tool-ready", meaning that they come out of the mould and are finished. Shiny surfaces, clear logos, no burrs. Metal would have to be deburred, milled, polished and coated. The plastic parts, on the other hand, are ready for the next steps.
Some of them swim against the usual flow of goods on their way to customers: apart from the HS brakes, which are manufactured entirely in Germany, the Swabian company also supplies its individual parts to a 150-strong subsidiary in Taichung, the centre of the Taiwanese bike industry. Most of the brand's disc brakes are assembled there. Some of them are then sent back to Germany, while others have reached their destination in the bicycle factories there.
It is the logic of a globalised industry that Magura Managing Director Michael Funk explains in the meeting room in Urach: "We are in global competition. If a competitor manufactures somewhere for significantly lower costs, we are at a disadvantage as a supplier. We can do everything here that is mainly done by machines. In assembly, the situation is different in some cases. But the core expertise remains in Germany, if only to maintain production in this country: We certainly won't hand over the engineering, the plastics expertise and the tools."
Company history: 130 years of Magura
Gustav Magenwirth, Bad Urach. The company founder created the company name from the name and location in 1893. Magenwirth was a versatile technical inventor with various patents for engines, pumps and valves. Magura entered the two-wheeler sector in 1923 with a "straight pull control lever" for motorbikes. Magura has been supplying BMW with motorbike brakes ever since. Although no Magenwirth runs the company today, it is still family-owned: the founder had only daughters, who gave up their names when they married. Their names are immortalised in the earlier disc brake models Luise, Julie and Martha.
Magura's entry into plastics technology in 1957, in addition to metal processing, is the basis for today's production made in Germany. The corresponding plant is not located in Bad Urach, but in nearby Hülben. Magura took the decisive step from motorbike to bicycle in 1987 with the invention and production of the first hydraulic brake for bicycles. The legendary "Hydrostop" rim brake was soon shining in Raceline neon yellow on the mountain bikes of prominent professional riders. The founder himself only reappeared by name in the Gustav M downhill brake - a miniaturised motorbike brake - introduced in 1996. It was instrumental in the triumph of the disc brake on mountain bikes.
One company, many subject areas
For Magura, as part of the Magenwirth Technologies Group, bicycle brakes are just one of several business areas. In addition to Magura as a manufacturer of plastic parts, bicycle and motorbike components, a Portuguese manufacturer of injection moulding tools and a Nuremberg die-casting company (Heuschkel) also operate within the holding company. As the largest single company, Magura generates around two thirds of the turnover of over 180 million euros. Purchasing, development and sales of bicycle and motorbike components take place at Magura's headquarters in Bad Urach.
Around 170 employees produce brake components at Magura Kunststofftechnik in Hülben on the Swabian Alb. Assembly and dispatch are based in nearby Hengen with 130 employees. In the bicycle sector, Magura is also a service and sales partner for Bosch pedelec drives. A subsidiary in Taiwan with 150 employees assembles brakes for Asian bicycle manufacturers, among others. The US branch in Olney, Illinois, manages overseas sales - in addition to bicycle parts, it also sells parts for snow blowers and Harley-Davidson motorbikes.
Facts about Magura
- Year of foundation: 1893
- Company headquarters: Bad Urach
- Owner: Magenwirth Holding
- Employees: approx. 680
- Operating area: over 15,000 square metres
- Annual turnover 2021: approx. 180 million euros
