15th Swissmem Machining Seminar

Swissmem, the largest association of Swiss tech industries, held its 15th machining seminar from 16 to 18 January 2024. Our Sharkproject speaker René Näf has been on the organising committee and responsible for the programme for years. And so one thing quickly led to another: Three presentations were arranged..

Sharks and the tech industry

Does that even fit together? The organisers quickly found parallels between the main theme of the event and the top predators of the seas: while development engineers are constantly trying to develop the most efficient cutting tools, sharks literally have them in their mouths. Despite the great export figures for Swiss precision tools on the Asian market, this unfortunately also applies to shark products.
And so it was more than justified to offer the sharks a stage at the machining seminar.

The seminar attracts around 400 specialists from all over Switzerland, who are prepared to pay a decent entrance fee to attend.

The Lectures

Traditionally, in addition to the technical presentations, the plenary session ends with a presentation that is out of the ordinary. Despite all the parallels that the organisers found between the technology and the sharks, the 45-minute shark presentations were definitely out of the ordinary!

At the seminar, 14 specialist presentations will be spread across three locations. In Pfäffikon and Olten, René Näf was able to present his shark knowledge in German. In Lausanne, on the other hand, there was a premiere: Neo-speaker Peter Salzmann presented in French! A possible starting point for offering our content in French as well as German and English in the future.

As all the presentations were held in front of full halls, we reached an audience of around 400.

Grateful audience

The presentations covered a wide range of topics, from the importance of sharks and their abilities to accident statistics and the business with sharks. Most of the audience were shocked by the fact that we humans are so aggressive towards these elegant animals and nature in general. Despite this, the audience only had positive comments, and for many it was "the highlight of the day".

Although there were no other documents available in French in Lausanne apart from the presentation slides, our QR code to the homepage was extremely popular.

We hope that we were able to attract new donors and activists. We are very motivated to expand our offering in French in the future.