About Eppendorf
Eppendorf develops, produces and sells premium products, solutions and services worldwide. The company is active in the Liquid Handling, Consumables, Separation & Instrumentation, Bioprocess and Digital Lab Solutions business areas and primarily serves academic and industrial laboratories. Our customers come from the pharmaceutical, biotech, chemical and food industries, for example. Eppendorf products are also used by clinical or environmental analytical laboratories, forensics and laboratories for process analysis, production and quality assurance.
As a premium provider in the life science industry, we play a leading role in the global market, particularly in the public sector. It is our goal to strengthen this leadership by continuously developing the company and concentrating on the innovative and high-growth areas of the life science markets. Eppendorf focuses its business activities on the market regions Europe, Americas, China and Asia/Pacific/Africa (APA). Eppendorf employs more than 5,100 employees worldwide in 33 countries, and is represented by distribution partners in additional markets. They all act in accordance with the mission of the company's founders: to improve human living conditions.
Brands & products
Eppendorf products include pipettes, pipetting systems, dispensers, centrifuges and mixers. Beyond that, Eppendorf also offers ultra-low-temperature freezers, fermentors and bioreactors, CO2 incubators and shakers. Consumables such as pipette tips, reaction tubes, microplates and single-use bioreactor vessels complete the range of top-quality premium products.
The Eppendorf Group includes strong corporate brands in the life sciences industry, the global core brand Eppendorf, and the subsidiary and partner brands USA Scientific and Starlab. The Japanese centrifuge brand Himac, which was acquired by Eppendorf in 2020, was integrated into the product portfolio of Eppendorf. The brand portfolio of the Eppendorf Group is supported by the Group Brand Management division.
It is part of the Eppendorf strategy to introduce new products and applications to the market on an ongoing basis. At the same time, service to support our products is increasingly gaining in importance; previously limited to repairs, our service activities now involve longer-term contracts.
Ownership, legal form & location of headquarters
The beginnings of the Eppendorf Group go back to 1945, when technicians around the company founders Dr. Heinrich Netheler and Dr. Hans Hinz began repairing medical devices on the grounds of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. The company is still owned by the founding families today. It is headquartered in Hamburg, Germany. Eppendorf has always been an innovative company, consistently choosing the name and legal form that best fit the company and its specific stage of development. Eppendorf AG was transformed into a SE (Societas Europaea) in October 2021. As a result, the company now conducts business as a European stock corporation. This new legal form underscores Eppendorf’s evolution into a modern, global company with a particular international and European focus.
Another positive effect of the change to an SE is that all employees across Europe, not only those in Germany, now have a body to represent them in the form of the SE works council. This international representation of our employees from European countries met for the first time in a constituent meeting in October 2022 and has established an international dialogue on how we will shape the future of Eppendorf together.
Our people
In 2022, as in years past, Eppendorf saw strong growth worldwide. Most notably, the Eppendorf Group expanded its personnel capacity in the area of production, sales, as well as in research and development. Workforce growth was led by the market regions of Europe, which saw headcount increase by 13% compared with the previous year, and Asia/Pacific/Africa (APA), where the number of employees grew by 8%. As of December 31, 2022, the Eppendorf Group had 5,131 employees worldwide. To allow for a flexible response to fluctuations in capacity utilization, the plants also use temporary employees in addition to their permanent workforce. In light of the sharp rise in production volumes during the year under review, the number of temporary employees also increased, rising to 319 as of December 31, 2022. The temporary workers are employed by Eppendorf via a temporary employment agency and are assigned simple tasks in the areas of Manufacturing, Administration, Finance, Supply Chain/Warehouse, Service, R&D and Sales.
Employees by gender
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Employees by region
GRI 2-7
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