Lasercor manufactures front of transformed Bernabéu Stadium using TRUMPF machines

Real Madrid is one of the world’s most successful football teams – and a visit to the club’s Santiago Bernabéu Stadium is a dream come true for many fans. The spectacular facade of the revamped Bernabéu contains thousands of stainless steel louvres, over half of which were fabricated by a company called Lasercor with millimetre precision using a TRUMPF TruLaser 5030 fiber laser cutter. What made the task even more challenging is that every louvre is different. The light displays on the new stadium shell are extraordinary – and so too is the story of how Lasercor got to where it is today.

Only 30 years ago, Lasercor didn’t even exist – not even as an idea. The family of company founder Julián Jiménez Candano earned their living in a completely unrelated sector: the food trade.

“I started working when I was 15 or 16, selling chicken in our store,” reveals Julián Jiménez Barroso, the current CEO and son of the founder.

Lasercor’s roots lay in a combination of hard work, a willingness to embrace risk and new ideas, and a certain amount of happenstance.

Some other members of the Jiménez family who worked in hospitality got chatting to a manufacturer of slot machines. At the time, this was a relatively new field of business in the Madrid region, so it was tricky getting hold of suitable spare parts for the machines. Julián Jiménez Candano had an affinity for technology, and his other family business ventures had familiarised him with how such machines were built, and what errors and malfunctions they were prone to. One day, the manufacturer asked him to take apart one of the gaming machines to pinpoint its electromechanical defects. This gave him some extra work on the side, at least until a supplier suddenly announced that it could no longer provide suitable sheet metal parts for the machines.

A job for the whole family

The father and his two sons decided that the only way to solve this supply problem was by acquiring a laser-cutting machine and producing its own sheet metal parts. Right from the start, they knew that quality was key, so they decided to make a major investment in a 2D laser-cutting machine from TRUMPF.

This was shortly before the euro was introduced, and Jiménez Barroso quotes a high eight-figure sum in the old Spanish currency which, at the time, would have been enough to buy a car. Despite their enthusiasm to innovate and take risks, the family felt uncomfortable about investing such a large amount of money, especially since they knew relatively little about the machine and the wider industry.

It was here that the sister and the wife of the current CEO stepped in to help. The two women carried out a market study to answer some key questions: Which companies in the Madrid region were able to cut sheet metal? Which companies needed precision-cut parts? What kind of order volume could they expect? What were the typical delivery times? What sectors were using cut metal parts? What niches could be exploited? After collecting, organizing and analyzing all the data, the family could see that there was a market and enough demand for additional competitors.

From food retail to sheet metal

In 2000, Julián Jiménez Candano founded Lasercor with his two sons. They had a TRUMPF machine, the slot-machine manufacturer as their first customer and – initially at least – lots of time when the machine was standing idle. It was clear they needed to bring in more orders.

“I sometimes think our background in a totally different industry actually gave us an advantage,” says the Lasercor CEO. “In the food trade, your focus is always on the customer, and that wasn’t the way the Madrid sheet metal sector worked at the time.”

The family launched a marketing campaign, emphasising their customer focus and transparency, even running some radio and TV commercials. The plan worked.

“Orders flooded in and suddenly our TRUMPF machine was running around the clock month after month,” says Jiménez Barroso.

Lasercor has been on a growth path ever since. It replaced its 400 sq m workshop with a 16,000 sq m production site, and the company now has a total of 23 TRUMPF machines, from a TruBend 5130 press brake and TruLaser 5030 fiber laser cutter to a TruLaser Weld 5000 automated laser welding cell and TruMark Station 7000 laser marking system.

Today, the company employs 170 people and has an annual turnover of 30 million euros. Using TRUMPF machines, Lasercor has cut, bent, engraved and welded parts of all shapes and sizes for some 8,000 customers. Its work ranges from one-off jobs for small businesses to standing orders for major corporations. The company’s customers make everything from road signs and household appliances to machines, entire plants and large wind turbines. And now that list includes the world-famous Santiago Bernabéu Stadium.

Gently curved metal louvers

The Bernabéu’s new wrap-around shell has cemented its status as one of Madrid’s most important landmarks.

“As a sculptural envelope of subtly curved diagonal metal louvres, the perforated layer varies in its degrees of translucence (the degree to which it lets through light), offering a multitude of different views,” says the website of German architect Gerkan, Marg and Partners, who together with Spanish project partners, won the competition for the stadium revamp. But behind this description is a project that posed a huge challenge to Lasercor as a supplier.

The new roof alone required 8,880 metal louvres, with a whole lot more needed for the facade. The initial specifications stated that all – or at least many – of the louvres would be identical. But during the cutting process, it emerged that each louvre was slightly different, often by a matter of a few millimetres. And each one had to slot into position perfectly. There were also six different surfaces that were designed to reflect light in different ways.

Almost perfect

Lasercor used a TruLaser 5030 fiber laser cutter with a 12 kW laser to precision-cut 4,400 louvres, as well as parts for the north and east facades. The company responsible for constructing the facade provided Lasercor with the metal sheets and dimensions – Lasercor then input everything into the TruLaser machines and precision-cut the parts.

The company spent 18 months working on the project, and only had to replace 60 of the 4,400 parts it produced, mostly due to damage during transport. Lasercor worked so fast it was even able to support some of the other fabricators involved in the project.

Quality is paramount

“If one machine isn’t up to the job, then we look for another one; if the material isn’t good enough, we find a better option,” says Jiménez Barroso. “None of our machines are more than four years old and we never stop investing. And if we make a mistake, we learn how to do it better next time.”

Lasercor is now exploring the concept of a smart factory. All its TRUMPF machines are already connected in a network. Some, such as the TruLaser Weld 5000 and the TruBend Cell 7000, are largely automated anyway. The TRUMPF smart factory consulting team has been supporting Lasercor ever since it embarked on its smart factory journey. The company’s next goal is to eliminate paper from the entire plant and achieve full digitalisation.

Jiménez Barroso is a big Real Madrid fan who attends every match. At home games, he never tires of seeing the contribution that Lasercor made to revamping this iconic stadium.