Mr. Engelbert Heinz, President of Kannegiesser: In-depth insight into customer needs to help China's washing market upgrade rapidly

Reporter：What’s the strategic positing of China market in your global positioning?

Mr. Engelbert Heinz：Our company founded in 1948, almost the same age as new China. At that time we started to make machines for textile industry, so we are right from the beginning in international wide. With the first development of industry laundry we changed total our product portfolio, and today we are 100% focus on industry laundry. When you are looking at the development only in industry laundry, the beginning of the industry laundry in US and EU, we are the best, we are the best in Germany, we are developing across this big region. When we are looking today, we have three big regions now, one is Europe, the second is America, the third is Asia. When you talk about Asia, there are three big areas, one is Japan, second is China, and the southeast Asia. The fastest development when we are looking at this area, it is China, China developed in last ten years in all segments so rapidly fast, so it is one of our core focuses in China. So there are three parallel strategy America, Europe and Asia.

Reporter：People commented your company’s investment in China is not very fast, we understand this is a more steady step, is this your company’s culture or a development strategy?

Mr. Engelbert Heinz：When you looking in the worldwide laundry market, it is completely investment 3 billion Euro, so our complete industry investment total worldwide around 3 billion Euro. This is so small compare with others, the market is split again and strongly fragmented.  To support this market, we are actively in 52 markets, actively with our experience. To do that, we are concentrating decentralized fares, service and experience. But we concentrate production to take the opportunities from each area of the world to bring into our innovation and split it again out. So that our basic strategy is to decentralize service and experience but concentrate production. And production is mainly orientated right now in Europe.

Reporter：Could you pls briefly introduce your company’s development path in China?

Mr. Engelbert Heinz：We started in China 2005, in that time we worked together with Sailstar, at least at that time we were working together and delivered the most five star hotels. As soon as the market was well developed in another direction, we founded 2010 our own subsidiary which was led by Ms. Wendy Chi in Shanghai and through this subsidiary is now supporting our market, with this we give to the market our experience and education, we give service and spare parts to support, and we get back the news information the trend of the market to bring back into our innovation center.

Reporter：How do you promote your innovative ideas in the future?

Mr. Engelbert Heinz：Come back to our concept, sales and experience are the competitive edge in the market, they are delivered to customers, the only choice is to be with customers, they don’t have to do administration, they don’t need to do purchase, they only concentrate to listen what our customer needs, to understand what’s their need to observe the trends, the trends can happen by our environment and by government rules. And they immediately link in our network which is concentrated our leadership and our international director, he select and split it in the right pieces, so our designers and our R&D can go with our power to develop the right products where we adapt in the right manner for China or for the US. So our eyes and ears we have in the market we can educate our customers. This give us the advantage to the market and to the way to customer demands.

Reporter：What opportunities and challenges do you think the rapidly changing Chinese laundry market will bring to you?

Mr. Engelbert Heinz：China is one of the market which really develop thing very fast. I have been working 30 years in this industry, there are a lot of markets I developed but never so fast developed as China. The last ten years is unbelievable how fast it developed. But it also cause issues for laundry, the demands from our customers are unbelievable going, they have to follow, they did something where you have to have people for that and you have to have people to invest power to invest the right solution to stay in the market. We can see two big areas, China market we found the solution, and we must find the solution, these two areas you have to higher utility cost in the world, you are around 30% on you cost only on utilities energy. When you look at the market like US, it’s 10%, so it is huge cost factor. And another is when you looking on your personal costs, salary, like that in the last ten years, I don’t know how much 300% or 500%? It is increase fast as well. Laundry has two big factors, energy and labor. This is increasing in labor, Chinese industry, Chinese laundry industry need to go to the way for automation, have to go to automatic, if they don’t sooner or later they will not stay in the market any more. We are happy to develop this, we have ideas and we have solution.