75 years of MIPA and more than 100 years of tradition
MIPA SE celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2023: The paint manufacturer, headquartered in Essenbach, was founded in 1948 as Paul Mittermayer GmbH in Landshut. However, the company's roots go back to the founding of Johann Baptist Mittermayer's paint factory in Landshut around 1900. After the founder's death, his three nephews ran the company until the factory was destroyed in the Second World War. Then the former managing directors and the founder’s nephews went their separate ways into business for themselves. This is how today's MIPA SE and Landshuter Lackfabrik Eduard Leiss GmbH came into being. With the takeover of Landshuter Lackfabrik by MIPA SE at the turn of the year 2018/2019 and the subsequent merger two years later, the two paths merged again. MIPA SE thus returned to its historical origins around 1900 and can look back on almost 125 years of paint production in Landshut.
In the post-war years, Paul Mittermayer GmbH initially focussed on dry paints for lime and glue coatings, pigment pastes and window putty. As agriculture remained one of the most important economic sectors in the region during these years, the company expanded its product range to include the coating of tractors and agricultural equipment and soon served a large regional clientele. In the years that followed, the product range was expanded to include vehicle and industrial paints in particular, laying the foundations for supra-regional co-operations and business abroad. Due to the sharp increase in production volumes and the associated need for expansion, the then managing partner and grandson of Paul Mittermayer, Berndt Fritzsche (now Chairman of the Supervisory Board of MIPA SE), looked for a suitable site for the production plant in the early 1990s. After a long search in and around the city of Landshut, they found what they were looking for in Essenbach, ten kilometres away, and moved in 1995. Today, the company premises at the headquarters are more than 25 times the size of the original site. The site of the old factory in Landshut is now the headquarters of Mipa Direkt GmbH, which was founded as a separate company and now has 14 retail and wholesale branches.
From its long tradition as a family business, a state-of-the-art, innovative and international company with a global reputation has emerged today. MIPA SE now has branches and partners in over 100 countries and continues to grow steadily. In just 25 years, MIPA has grown from a company with around 100 employees to a group of companies with more than 1,500 employees.
On the product side, today not only individual products are developed and produced, but also all components of complex coating systems. With modern mixing systems, customers can fulfil an almost unlimited number of colour and requirement wishes. Mipa paints can be found not only on thousands of vehicles worldwide, but also as radar-compatible effect paints on aeroplanes, on the national stadium in Budapest or as a particularly dull matt coating on the steel structure of the “Neue Nationalgalerie” (New National Gallery) in Berlin.
