The version TRUMPF launched in 2022 kept the machine, the operating data and the billing in TRUMPF's hands, where the 2020 plan had given the financing to an insurer and the data analysis to its IoT subsidiary.
What lasted was the capability the model forced TRUMPF to build: remote operation, now sold as a service of its own.
The move
Most machine makers assume the hard part of selling output instead of machines is the financing. TRUMPF solved the financing, built the remote operation, and still found that sheet-metal fabricators did not want what it was selling. Its laser cutting machines are bought outright or financed through TRUMPF Bank. In October 2020 TRUMPF and Munich Re announced a plan to charge an agreed price for each cut part instead. The offer reached the market at EuroBLECH in September 2022 for one machine, the TruLaser Center 7030. A year later it was available in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland, and TRUMPF's German product page still offered it in August 2025.
What the customer buys
A fully automated laser cell with a store for sheets and finished parts, placed in the fabricator's own plant. TRUMPF plans and programs production, maintains the cell and clears faults remotely from its Remote Control Center in Neukirch, while the customer runs its own orders through it. The pitch is labour, not capital: TRUMPF aimed it at firms "with full order books and a shortage of skilled labor" and claims productivity gains of up to 50 percent in pilots, without a baseline. None of this is AI: it is sensors, cameras, connectivity and people operating machines from a distance. In the 2020 plan, financing and a downtime guarantee were to come from Munich Re.
How it is priced
The unit is the part. TRUMPF quotes the price of each part before production and bills exactly that price, with consumables and ancillary costs included. Customers pay only for parts actually made, above an agreed minimum utilisation. The part price, the minimum and the contract length are not public. The fabricator pays TRUMPF, and the machine stays TRUMPF's property.
The detail that matters sits under the price. According to TRUMPF managers on the Circularity.fm podcast, material makes up 80 percent of a part's price, and TRUMPF chose not to manage it because it is "the home turf of our customers". A guaranteed part price, they said, is impossible without remote control, nesting and service control.
Who owns the customer
The 2020 plan put three parties around one fabricator: TRUMPF supplied machine and service, Munich Re financed the machine and carried the risk, and its subsidiary relayr provided the data analysis. Munich Re's HSB unit marketed the offer with its own output guarantee. The financier held the asset, the risk and the data.
In April 2021 TRUMPF moved to take joint control of the laser-cutting-as-a-service segment of IoT Financing Services LLC, a company Munich Re owned in full at the end of 2020. From 2022 TRUMPF's material names no partner: TRUMPF owns the machine, runs it, and quotes and bills every part. I read this as TRUMPF taking the customer back in-house; no source gives the reason.
Then the customer declined to be owned. TRUMPF managers on the Circularity.fm podcast, December 2024: "nobody was joining the bus"; the model is "not seen as a benefit because it's a high transparency"; "European based companies would like to own the machine". With no dealers involved, the conflict is with the buyer. My reading: a guaranteed part price, set against the price the fabricator charges, shows the machine maker its margin.
What it took
Two years from announcement to launch. A fully automated cell fitted with cameras, sensors and remote-control systems, a Remote Control Center in Neukirch, and a digital chain from part upload to a guaranteed price. The remote-operation technology, built with the start-up prenode, won the Scale! category of the Microsoft Intelligent Manufacturing Award 2023. Even the contractual 2020 cooperation needed clearance from the German Federal Cartel Office, according to TRUMPF's lawyers Menold Bezler, and the joint-control step needed Austria's in 2021. No customer count, machine count or revenue has been published; one early customer is named, Reiff Umformtechnik in Leipheim.
What a mid-market operator can copy
Test whether your buyer will show you their cost before you price the outcome. If your customers compete on the gap between your input and their selling price, a per-unit price is a disclosure they have to accept, not a cheaper entry ticket.
Keep the asset and the data, or accept that whoever finances the machine shares your customer. TRUMPF's launched version is the one in which it holds all three.
Use the bold model to build what sells on its own. TRUMPF carved remote operation out into a general group service, and its managers say one person can look after 20 machines at different customers. Imagine this: a pump maker launches a pay-per-cubic-metre offer that only a few water utilities sign. The monitoring and remote diagnostics it had to build for that offer become a service contract every existing customer can buy, without opening their books.
Sources
- TRUMPF and Munich Re, "Pay-per-part: TRUMPF und Munich Re planen neues Geschäftsmodell für die produzierende Industrie", press release, 14 October 2020.
- TRUMPF, "Pay-per-part: TRUMPF offers new business model to utilize spare machine capacity", press release, 21 September 2022.
- TRUMPF, "TRUMPF's digital business model helps tackle shortage of skilled workers", press release, 20 September 2023.
- TRUMPF, "Pay per Part", product page (Germany), archived 14 August 2025.
- HSB, a Munich Re company, "Pay-per-Part", product page, archived 30 November 2022.
- Bundeswettbewerbsbehörde, merger notification BWB/Z-5384, IoT Financing Services LLC; TRUMPF GmbH + Co. KG, April 2021.
- Munich Re, list of shareholdings as at 31 December 2020, Group Annual Report 2020.
- Roland Berger and Microsoft, "Microsoft Intelligent Manufacturing Award: winners 2023", 28 March 2023.
- Menold Bezler, "Pay-per-part-Modell: TRUMPF receives clearance from the German Federal Cartel Office", 28 October 2020.
- Circularity.fm, "TRUMPF: Be more Efficient with Equipment-as-a-Service", PaaS Decoded episode 15, 3 December 2024.