AUTOMATION, PRESS AND TOOLING, A.P.& T. AB*AP&T

Their core work

AP&T is a Swedish industrial equipment manufacturer specializing in automated press lines, hot stamping systems, and tooling solutions for sheet metal forming — primarily serving the automotive and aerospace industries. Their core product is turnkey production systems that automate the forming of high-strength steel and lightweight materials into structural components at industrial scale. In H2020, they contributed as an industrial partner bringing real production-floor knowledge: they know what it costs to process materials at volume, and where the bottlenecks are in mass manufacturing lightweight parts. They are not a research organization — they are the factory-floor validation partner that turns research outcomes into manufacturable processes.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

AP&T's two projects span 2016–2021 and show a consistent focus on sheet metal forming, but with a meaningful shift in framing. Their first project, LoCoMaTech, was centered on materials and cost reduction in lightweight vehicle production — a problem driven by automotive industry weight targets and material economics. Their second project, FormPlanet, moved toward building shared testing infrastructure for forming processes, suggesting a pivot from solving a specific production problem to building reusable industry knowledge assets. The addition of a Digital sector tag in FormPlanet points toward a growing interest in data-driven process validation, though this remains nascent given the limited project count.

AP&T appears to be moving from pure production-process participation toward helping define shared testing standards and digital infrastructure for the forming industry — a signal that they may be positioning as a knowledge hub, not just an equipment supplier.

How they like to work

AP&T has participated in both projects strictly as a consortium partner, never as coordinator — consistent with an industrial company that joins research projects to validate or apply findings rather than to lead them. Their 36 unique partners across 11 countries across just two projects indicates participation in medium-to-large, multi-stakeholder consortia, which is typical for industrial partners in RIA and IA schemes. This breadth of partnerships with no apparent repeat collaborators suggests they are comfortable operating as a specialist industrial contributor in diverse research networks rather than cultivating a stable inner circle of long-term research allies.

AP&T has engaged with 36 unique consortium partners spread across 11 countries through just two projects, reflecting their participation in broadly-composed European research consortia. Their geographic footprint is pan-European, consistent with EU-funded automotive and manufacturing research networks that typically span Sweden, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Central Europe.

What sets them apart

AP&T brings something most academic and research partners cannot: a working factory. They manufacture and sell industrial press automation systems commercially, which means their validation of manufacturing processes carries real-world credibility — if AP&T says a process is cost-effective at volume, that claim is grounded in production reality, not laboratory conditions. For consortia needing an industrial end-user or production technology provider in automotive lightweighting or sheet metal forming, AP&T fills a role that is difficult to replace with a pure research institution.

Highlights from their portfolio

• LoCoMaTech
  The larger of AP&T's two projects at EUR 635,644 EC funding, directly targeting the automotive industry's core challenge of reducing mass-production costs for lightweight structural components.
• FormPlanet
  Notable for its ambition to create a pan-European sheet metal forming testing hub, combining manufacturing and digital sector dimensions — AP&T's first foray into shared industry infrastructure beyond their own product line.