Metso's Lokomo celebrates 100 years - From steam locomotive manufacturer to crushing equipment competence center

Metso's Tampere unit, better known locally as Lokomo, is celebrating its one hundredth year of industrial existence in May in Tampere, Finland. Oy Lokomo Ab started operating in Tampere in April 1915. Today Metso's Tampere unit is the company's most important global competence center for mobile crushers. The crushing and screening equipment to efficiently and safely crush rock and ore are developed in Tampere.

"Lokomo's one-hundred-year history is indicative of its ability to transform and be innovative and to remain at the cutting edge of technology over the course of a century. Throughout its history, Metso's Tampere unit has boldly transformed and developed fresh innovations to meet the needs of the day. An excellent example of this is the unit's evolution into a globally significant crushing equipment competence centre for today's Metso," says Metso's President and CEO Matti Kähkönen.

"The Lokomo unit's success and development into the nerve centre of Metso's crushing technology over the course of one hundred years wouldn't have been possible without the thousands of Lokomo employees who helped to build the unit into a strong and internationally significant Metso competence center," notes Pirjo Virtanen, VP Operations and Site Manager, Metso.

Lokomo started its operations in 1915 as a steam-engine factory competing with the local Tampella. The company's name stems from the word locomotive. Just a couple of years later, Lokomo manufactured its first crushers, which were delivered to the National Board of Public Roads and Waterways. A key driver behind the production of locomotives and crushers was the company-owned steel foundry, which was very modern already back in the 1920s.

Lokomo has manufactured a wide-ranging portfolio of products through the years: church bells, peat harvesters, steamrollers and road graders, mobile cranes and forestry equipment. The two deep-sea diving bells manufactured for the Soviet Union's Ministry of Education and Science were the source of a minor foreign policy scandal.

The Tampere factory with its  over 700 employees manufactures the bulk of Metso's mobile crushing plants, of which more than 7,000 have been manufactured over 30 years.