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> There have been entire German companies operating without marketing and sales departments Very interesting! Are there any case studies on that?
by 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.
- ThePhysicist 10y agoI think it's more useful to think of innovation as a continuous process instead of something static. Following that line of thinking, even if your competitor is be able to fully replicate your product, he will still be unable to follow your pace of innovation. In addition, the services and expertise around a given product are usually as important as the product itself, and harder to replicate than the product.
- DasIch 10y agoSize in that case generally applies to the number of employees and not to revenue, profits, market share or anything like that.
- Jugurtha 10y agoNevertheless, it was interesting to see how they downplayed their company. There was no woop woop and no flamboyance. I liked that.
- Nimitz14 10y ago> 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. Herrenknecht?
- Jugurtha 10y agoI can't remember the company name, sorry.
- 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.