What kind of company are you? Please give a brief introduction.

K.Hartwall is a privately-held family company founded in Finland  85 years ago. We bring logistic efficiency by delivering innovative returnable load carriers and associated services. Over the years we have acquired in-depth knowledge of logistics processes and of their financial and environmental impacts.

We work closely with customers around the world in more than 65 countries to realise measurable benefits through improved logistical flows. Our efficient global delivery capability makes K.Hartwall the partner of choice for numerous and large companies in the retail, dairy, beverage, industrial logistics and automotive sectors.

What are your company’s considerations in expanding into China? What are the goals?

K.Hartwall has been active in China for 10 years now. We have a local office with 6 employees in Suzhou. We cooperate with long-term manufacturing partners in China, who produce K.Hartwall designed and specified products, which we export and also sell locally on the Chinese market. China offers K.Hartwall an interesting platform for sourcing, production and in the recent years also for sales. Two years ago we founded our sales company K.Hartwall Suzhou (Trading) Co. Ltd as we believe China is a growing market for our solutions and we definitively intend to extend our business in China in the future.

How do you think about the development of China’s logistics industry and the application of logistics technology and equipment? How do you judge the future market space of logistics equipment?

The logistics industry in China has shown a significant growth, which has led to an increased demand for logistics technology and more modern equipment. The growth will continue and thereby also the need for innovative products and solutions. We believe we have a role to play in this.

China’s logistics equipment industry has developed rapidly, and the level of technology and equipment has been improved rapidly. What are your core competencies in entering the Chinese market? What’s the marketing strategy? What area will you focus on? What are your differentiated competition tools?

We can help our customers to maximise their logistics efficiency by together with them looking at their supply chain and identify their logistics problems. By finding the right solutions – read load carrier(s) for their needs they can reduce manual handling, save storage space, increase cubic fill or reduce their inventories. We have a deep knowledge of logistics processes which we transform into products and solutions within our bespoken R&D function in Finland. Our own leading factory in Finland gives us a significant advantage for prototyping, testing and efficient manufacturing. We bring logistics efficiency through innovation and we are a globally operating, leading provider of industrial returnable load carrier products and solutions.

We note that your products focus on the “material handling” and “visual management” categories. Please introduce the ideas of these products and their associated applications, as well as the degree of reducing manual labor and improving efficiency. In China, new logistics and intelligent manufacturing are the main fields leading the application of logistics equipment. Please tell us in detail about which scenarios are your company’s products mainly used in?

Our products and solutions are used within the retail, dairy, beverage, postal & parcel and automotive industries. K.Hartwall is the preferred reliable value-added innovation partner that offers significant cost savings and increased revenues. We improve our customers’ logistics and merchandising processes with focus on lowering the total cost of ownership.

For example we help our automotive customers typically tier 1 or tier 2 supplier to OMG’s:

• Minimize time used for manual handling
• Simplify return logistics
• Optimize vehicle fill
• Use less secondary packaging material
• Ergonomics & safety
• Forklift-free environment
• Compatibility with automation & robotics
• Optimize your fleet size

We also want to have a large portfolio of modular products which cover all the different needs of our customers.

These are only few examples of how our value-added products & solutions have a positive effect on:

• cost savings
• productivity increase
• efficiency increase
• ergonomics/safety
• environment

When our customer can work and produce more efficiently they have more time to concentrate on their own customers.