Though today a naturalised citizen of Liechtenstein, Harry Sawatzki, one of the founders of SAWATEC AG, was actually born in Germany on 18 December 1946. The company founder completed his education by obtaining his university entrance-level diploma at grammar school.

After leaving school, Sawatzki went to engineering college in Hamburg and Karlsruhe and trained to be a mechanical engineer. He chose to specialise in precision engineering and electrical engineering. The young Sawatzki successfully completed his four years of study in 1969.

The co-founder of SAWATEC set out on his professional career by joining the Convac company near Pforzheim as a development engineer. Here he gained his first professional experience of the semiconductor industry: at the time, Convac was developing machines for the semiconductor and, later on, the CD industry.

In 1973 Sawatzki took over the management of his parents’ electrical engineering firm. Due to his experience and special training in what was then the new field of semiconductor technology the young engineer Sawatzki also worked as a consultant for various well-known companies such as IBM, Siemens, Intel and Censor in Vaduz.

Contact with the Liechtenstein-based Censor organisation eventually led to Sawatzki accepting their offer of a full-time position at the company. In 1979 he moved to Vaduz, Liechtenstein where he began working as a development engineer for Censor, a patent and research institute. After the company was sold in 1983 to Perkin-Elmer, a US corporation, Sawatzki took over management duties for the construction department, which he ran until he left the company in 1993.

In 1993 he set up his own company, ‘Sawatzki Engineering’, in Vaduz. Three years later Sawatzki and his son Bruno jointly founded SAWATEC AG in Schaan. After the first successful start-up years the young, expanding company moved to Ruggell, also in the Principality of Liechtenstein, where it is still based today. Sawatzki handed over operative management duties for the company to his son Bruno in January 2006. Even so, he still remains an active member of the management board with responsibility for all development activities.