Ninety and counting

The Finnish controls and ballasts manufacturer Helvar celebrates its 90th anniversary this month with ambitious plans to double its business in three years. Ben Cronin speaks to Paul Wilmshurst, managing director at Helvar UK, and global director for Helvar Lighting Controls

You have said that Helvar hasn’t always marketed itself very well. Tell us about its product blend and history.

Helvar is a 100 million euro company worldwide, with the business being split between our large volume ballast division and our more specialised lighting control offering. We’re a Finnish company, and a family-owned, private business that is this month, celebrating its ninetieth anniversary.

How are you geared to cope with the changing landscape in lighting?

At Helvar we see that LED is changing the landscape of the driver and controls business. As a company we’re extremely well-suited to turn innovation and potential into the market growth as we’re completely independent from the fixture manufacturers. This means we can concentrate on compatibility and standardisation of LED systems and drivers, together with the lighting control solution, including interfaces.

Do you think Scandinavians are further ahead of the curve in terms of lighting controls?

I think certainly that is something that we are seeing, and being our home market as well, it helps having a well-known brand in those countries. But certainly the Scandinavians are more open to innovative ideas. As a whole, Norway, Finland and Denmark together represent a bigger market for us than the UK at the moment. Overall, we all know Germany is the biggest controls market in Europe but it’s a difficult market to crack – particularly for non-German companies. They also happen to like very simple solutions, for an installer-type specification. What I mean by that is simple electrical switches or sensors that are very simple to install using KNX as a protocol.

Is the energy efficiency issue keeping you going during the recession?

I think the energy efficiency story is keeping a lot of people going. We’re seeing good levels of enquiries through both our UK office and our international offices. Our quote rate is as high as it has ever been and certainly the energy drive is still there. However, we do see some very nervous situations in Europe. But in the business outside Europe – in the Middle East and the Far East – we do see good growth year on year. We probably will see more of that in the next six to 12 months – outside Europe will be the main growth area for us.

There are a lot of supply side issues for lamp manufacturers at the moment and the equivalent for controls manufacturers was the components shortage last year. How did you fare?

We came through very well. We were one of the better companies that could service orders from the lighting industry. You ask luminaire manufacturers here in the UK and they’ll confirm that. Some companies were having tremendous difficulty getting components, so we were getting quite a bit of business based on the shortages others were seeing.

Did you stockpile components?

We had good stockpiles of components, that’s for sure, but we had good purchasing systems in place for sourcing these components. Not that the others didn’t, but we seemed to do it better for some reason. I think it’s also to do with location. Because our electronics for the controls systems side are mainly done in the UK, we were better able to source components than if they were in the Far East.

Do you see the advent of apps and tablet computers as a threat?

No, I think we’re encouraging those sorts of developments. Actually, in the residential part of the market there are many app-makers building apps for many different manufacturers. We could develop our own app but then it would only work with Helvar lighting controls. The advantage of an app is where it’s multi-brand and there are quite a few decent apps that cover more than just one brand. So we’ve decided consciously not to enter that part of the market because there’s some brilliant stuff already there. However, for the commercial market we do see the potential for wireless visualisation product development where you can track the energy usage of consumers and that can be visualised on an iPhone, Android or tablet computer.

What are your targets for the business now that you’ve joined?

The ambition is to double our business within three years. It’s quite an ambitious target, but that’s where we want to be. Helvar, as a brand, is known in the lighting industry, but if you mention it to most people they’d think of ballasts, not controls. Our aim is to be a major controls supplier, not just ballasts. So we want to get that side of the business on a level pegging with the ballast brand identity. That means financial growth, but also brand identity growth.

Are you looking to develop any partnerships in the industry?

We’ve got some good strengths with our luminaire manufacturers and we’ll continue to use those strengths and get leverage there. We also have strengths in our own project business but what we want to develop further is to have value-added resellers or distributors to strengthen those markets or sales areas where we don’t have representation.

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