Home is where the heart is

26 July 2011

Following a seat-of-the-pants takeover in 2004, Wila is one of the success stories of the lighting industry. Ben Cronin asks UK managing director Neil Condliffe how the UK business has managed to double in size over the course of the last five years

It’s now seven years since the British takeover. This was followed a few years later by the recession. How did the company cope going into a recession after the restructuring measures you took?

Since the takeover in 2004 it took a couple of years stabilising the company before the market encountered the difficulties it has faced over the last few years. We took some decisive decisions early on and kept the company lean where we could but invested heavily in other areas, such as a UK product development department and manufacturing facility in order to maximise our capabilities and diversity within our core focus areas. This has resulted in some of the most successful years since Wila entered the UK in 1993.

Is the new factory in Abingdon a sign that you want to place quality over price?

Our decision to invest in UK manufacturing was based on a number of factors. When you have your own factory and design team on your doorstep it allows you to be more reactive to the UK market needs. Equally it enables you to be more in control of quality and it generally means we can be more competitive too. The UK will focus mainly on linear luminaires and some LED downlights, while our well-established factory in Germany will continue to develop products across the whole range. We’re finding that we get involved in a lot more projects that have quite specialist needs. The way the euro has gone has helped manufacturers’ needs in the UK as well.

How much of a shift have you made to LEDs? What blend of the business is still T5 and HID?

T5 and HID currently accounts for about 70-75 per cent of our business, although the demand for LEDs is increasing rapidly. New product development, as you’d expect, is quite heavily dominated by LED. But we still look at T5 as a solution. It’s still a very viable solution and I think you have to be careful. LED is not the only light source out there, but it is playing a pretty heavy part in what we do. And I have to say it does play a major part in demand – we’re being asked for LED increasingly. Certainly, in future development, for all products we develop – even if they’re a T5 solution – we will be looking at LED as an option for that. So, for example, we will be launching a new range, which is called Ingenic and that’s been designed to not only take T5, but it will also be future-proofed, if that’s the right word, to incorporate LED in the future as well. If LED is our only option, I think it might be inhibitive in some cases. We need some flexibility out there.

There are moves within the lighting community to focus on the recyclability and sustainability of materials used in products. How sustainable are your products?

We are well on the way to implementing ISO 14001 in the UK to keep in line with our German operation. We have slightly delayed the implementation of this in order to include our new UK manufacturing facility alongside the rest of the UK operations. When you have a manufacturing facility it adds in a lot more things to consider. WILA has been assessing its carbon footprint since 2005. We’re not truly carbon neutral in the sense that we do offset by investing in UK tree plantations and renewable wind farm developments across the world to achieve that. We’re also looking at the energy we’re using and looking at using energy through renewable sources only, so there is a movement to become genuinely carbon neutral, without offsetting – that’s our ultimate goal.

How have you developed your export business in the Middle East, India and other parts of the EU. What about your position in Germany and the UK?

Our strongest market, currently, is Germany, as you’d probably expect. Our second strongest market is the UK. To be honest there’s been a decline in the UK market. We’ve actually not declined; we’ve managed to keep a constant. So effectively, in terms of how the market’s reacting, we’ve done very well against it. If I look at the Middle Eastern market, we’ve invested in new personnel. A lot of the international business is out of Germany, but we’ve invested in personnel, including UK guys, who are covering our agents in the Middle East and other international countries. Our Middle East business has dramatically improved – we’ve just brought a very large project on board. You know, where everyone says ‘the market’s going to shrink, batten down the hatches,’ we have made the business more lean where we can, but we’ve consciously invested money when everyone else is cutting, but invested in the right areas. One thing the UK is very strong at is good international lighting designers. Wila is very keen to work with UK designers who concentrate on international business, as we can provide support not only in the UK but also in the country the project is taking place, which assists the design team’s continuity.

Neil Condliffe was talking to Ben Cronin