100 years of Anton Paar – the big anniversary celebration

2022-06-26 | Corporate

Around 2,700 guests from all over the world came together on Friday, June 24, 2022, to celebrate a century of Anton Paar together.

In 1922, Anton Paar founded a machine shop in Heinrichstraße in Graz – with a few hand-operated machines, small, modest and very traditional. Over the course of its 100-year history, the company has developed from this one-man machine shop into a measurement technology group with over 3,700 employees worldwide. Today, the company is a global market leader in the fields of density and concentration measurement, rheometry and CO2 measurement.

The company has written history characterized by curiosity, inventiveness and initiative – starting with Anton Paar himself, his daughter Gretl Platzer, the first female master machinist in Styria, her son-in-law Ulrich Santner, who combined the traditional company with innovative research, and his son-in-law Friedrich Santner, who turned Anton Paar into the internationally successful company it is today.

Such a unique story needs to be celebrated. And so the company invited the entire workforce worldwide as well as representatives from politics, business partners and friends of the family to the celebration at Stadthalle Graz. Around 2,700 employees from Asia, America, Australia, Africa and Europe came to Graz for the big celebration. Many visited Styria for the first time. "I would like to thank everyone for coming. I am particularly pleased that so many employees from all over the world came to celebrate with us. That makes me proud and grateful," said CEO Dr. Friedrich Santner.

The anniversary celebration offered a diverse, colorful supporting program. Employees from a wide variety of countries provided an entertaining evening with their performances, and people danced to Egon7 until late into the night. "The picture at Stadthalle was a very special one – exuberant celebrations, a joyful togetherness of different people and cultures. This diversity is beautiful and also, to a certain extent, what our company is all about," described main organizer Maria Santner of the anniversary celebration.

The big celebration in the Graz Stadthalle was the highlight of the anniversary year, but much more is on offer, such as the exhibition "exakt! The world of Anton Paar" at Graz Museum.