transport and commercial vehicles, as well as stationary applications. Heraeus Additive Manufacturing GmbH (H3D), solution provider for Additive Manufacturing. H3D develops powders and manufacturing processes for advanced materials such as metallic glasses, refractory metals, titanium aluminides and precious metals. Sold, restructured and disinvested businesses As part of the reorganization in 2015, Heraeus Precious Metals and Materials Technology were converted to seven Global Business Units. W.C. Heraeus The precious metals division of the company always generated the most sales for Heraeus. When the price of gold, silver and platinum rose sharply in the 1930s, Heraeus also turned to platinum group metals such as palladium, rhodium and ruthenium. The development of the precious metal strowger switch and high-speed contact opened the market to Heraeus in 1950 to sell large volumes of contact rivets and springs. This laid the foundations for the company to enter markets such as telecommunications, microelectronics and computing. W. C. Heraeus was split up in 2010 to form Heraeus Precious Metals and Heraeus Materials Technology. Heraeus Kulzer The particularly hard nature of the dental material Alba (an alloy of gold, silver and palladium) allowed Heraeus to supply dental technology as early as the 1930s. In the years that followed, Heraeus developed a variety of gold and ceramic bonding alloys. Heraeus Kulzer was split up in 2009 to form Heraeus Dental and Heraeus Medical. Heraeus Vacuum Smelting The process of smelting metals in a vacuum is based on early development work carried out by Heraeus. The first vacuum furnaces came into use before the First World War. They were used to make alloys in the total absence of air. The first vacuum induction furnace was developed in 1917. Heraeus Vacuum Smelting started operations as an independent company in 1923, producing a variety of base metal alloys for use in electrics. The company owned 84 German patents between 1923 and 1933, resulting in 101 foreign registrations. Due to the increasingly high cost of investment and the different nature of this area of the business compared to the rest of the company, Heraeus sold its Vacuum Smelting business to Siemens (now SMS-MEVAC) in 1933. The Ruhrstahl-Heraeus process for vacuum degassing of steel was also a Heraeus innovation. Heraeus Analytical Technology In the beginning of the 20th century Heraeus became a pioneer in the automatization of combustion analysis for the determination of non-metallic elements like carbon, nitrogen, sulphur, hydrogen and oxygen in chemicals,