5 ms·
Bosch, a German company that serves the auto manufacturers, seems to have bought patents on a battery technology that could be a breakthrough. Remember that 'th
by urlwolf 10y ago
Bosch, a German company that serves the auto manufacturers, seems to have bought patents on a battery technology that could be a breakthrough. Remember that 'the German way' of doing business is not to make noise at all. There have been entire German companies operating without marketing and sales departments, and there still are.
I live in Germany.
- tome 10y ago> There have been entire German companies operating without marketing and sales departments Very interesting! Are there any case studies on that?
- ThePhysicist 10y agoGoogle for "hidden champions". That's the name given to many of the companies that are actually world & technology leaders in their respective markets but that are unknown even to most people in Germany.
- raverbashing 10y agoAlso "mittelstand"
- Jugurtha 10y agoI love the way Germans use that word, which is the equivalent of Small and Medium-sized Entreprises in the U.S. (I'm from Algeria, it's PME here). I was watching a segment on these companies the other day that addressed the importance of small companies, which constitute the backbone of the German economy. They took one such small company and chatted with its founder. He started talking numbers and I believe he said his small company builds tunnel boring machines and had a turnover of about 5 billion euros. They also mentioned how they're not worried about China because Chinese companies mass produce stuff using German machinery. And how German companies make "the thing that goes into the thing that goes into the thing". Anyway, it was of course an oversimplified CNN-MSNBC-like segment, but it's interesting to see what they consider small company.
- sumedh 10y agoHow long will it take for the Chinese companies to copy the German tech and make the machine inhouse?
- tome 10y agoI guess it's not that easy to copy tunnel boring machines.
- Jugurtha 10y agoAs I said in my previous comment, I don't think that China can't. It's a launch capable country and I think it's safe to assume that if they're launching rockets and and putting stuff into orbit, tunnel boring machines are well within their adjacent possible. We're talking about a nation that had ships 450 feet long and 150 feet wide 600 years ago. If Noah was real, he was probably Chinese, lived in the 15th century, and the animal pairs he took with him were fast robotized arms from Germany.
- Jugurtha 10y agoI don't think China can't build the technology. The most known brands in industrial robots for example are the Swiss ABB and the German KUKA. These are ubiquitous (even in the U.S.) the same way Siemens (German) is in Programmable Logic Controllers. So I don't think it's a matter of being unable to make it, maybe the comparative advantage lies somewhere else. PS: Here's a website that I love. http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/ http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/ You can look things up by country, by product, etc. What country exports to what other country, and what does it export or import. There's also the "economic complexity index" of each country. Pretty neat.
- jacquesm 10y agoABB is headquartered in Zurich but is Swedish-Swiss more than just Swiss.
- 10y ago
- dilemma 10y agoWouldn't that have more to do with the company serving businesses rather than consumers, and so have less need for general brand awareness, and focus their sales and marketing efforts entirely differently?
- praptak 10y agoI have done IT consulting for a company like this. Even though they were the world market leader they were so low profile that the CEO would usually pick up the phone when I called them. There was no big secret behind it. It's just that their whole market was like 20 companies worldwide served by maybe 7 providers of which 2-3 actually counted.
- patrickk 10y agoA friend worked for the market leader in "rivets and rivet punching machines", and they did very little/no marketing from what he said. They didn't seem to understand the web at all, or maybe it simply didn't matter, as much as that sounds like heresy on HN. They had a huge contract with a household name German car company, and the rest of their sales with from a catalogue sold directly to smaller manufacturers. There's countless German companies like this, scattered all over Germany. If you're in a particular industry, you likely know the highest quality manufacturer in your segment, and there's a good chance that it's a German company.
- jacquesm 10y agoDitto in tooling, Hertel bits for instance.
- lifty 10y agoCan you point to a link to the patent or article talking about it? Thanks
- martinko 10y agoDo you have any more information regarding the battery technology?
- urlwolf 10y agoNope, sorry. This was an informal conversation with a German friend. He probably doesn't know for sure what patent this is. It's not something that is on the news.
- maxerickson 10y agoIt could be http://www.bosch.com/en/com/boschglobal/csr_battery_technology/an_innovative_leap/an-innovative-leap.html http://www.bosch.com/en/com/boschglobal/csr_battery_technolo... Media stories about it talk about doubling storage capacity. If so, it's a product of US government research. http://www.seeo.com/about-us/ http://www.seeo.com/about-us/
- robterrell 10y agoIIRC Bosch was the subcontractor on the electric conversion of the Fiat 500 and I thought they did a fantastic job. A joy to drive.
- raldi 10y agoWhat's an example of a large German company without any sales or marketing?
- germanier 10y agoThey are not large. Maybe a hundred employees, eight digit revenue and very few products. In the south-west you see them at every corner, relying on word of mouth and the occasional trade fair. But they mostly have someone working on that full time nowadays. In line with the topic I'd like to plug Mennekes (which does have a small public relations department and is larger than the companies mentioned above). They supply plugs for practically every electric car.
- kuschku 10y agoOr take the Walterwerke, making machines for Ice Cream Cones, and being the global leader in that industry. 50 employees, tiny amount of machines they produce, but without them, the world would be far worse as everyone could only eat ice cream in those tasteless paper-like ice cream cones.
- oevi 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions#List_of_selected_hidden_champions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions#List_of_selec...