Business View - January 2016 81
country that would have allowed him to work at the
high level of expertise for which his education had pre-
pared him. So, instead, he took a maintenance job at
a small manufacturing company in Toronto. One day,
Manfred’s boss came to him, holding a four-inch piece
of plastic drainage tubing, and asked him if he could
build a machine that would make a similar piece of
piping. Manfred had no experience with plastics and
no idea how to proceed. But being the kind of person
he was, he took on the project, anyway.
According to his son, Stefan, who is now Corma’s
Executive Vice President, Manfred had one of those
middle-of-the-night Eureka moments, and figured out
a way to build a machine that, years later, was to be
merely the first of this inventor’s 848 separate pat-
ents for innovative engineering. Manfred’s boss sold
his early machine two or three times to plastic pipe
producers, but then came the Arab oil embargo of the
early 1970s. When the price of oil started to climb,
the conventional wisdom maintained that the price of
plastic – a petrochemical product – would be too high
and that end-users would switch to other materials for
their piping. Once again, Manfred took leap of faith.
Convinced of his own abilities and the expectation that
AT A GLANCE
WHO:
Corma, Inc
WHAT:
Manufacturer of corrugated plastic pipe
manufacturing equipment
WHERE:
Concord (Toronto), Ontario, Canada
WEBSITE
:
Manfred Lupke,
President and CEO of Corma
MANUFACTURING
