I recently had the chance to chat with Kjell Lyngstad, the Director-North American Sales, Marketing & Engineering for Aventics, the former Bosch Rexroth Pneumatics. Aventics has its U.S. headquarters in Lexington, Ky.; Lyngstad has been with the company in Sweden since 1997, and he relocated to the U.S. in 2001.
Q: How do you think that the split from Bosch Rexroth positions Aventics for the long run?
A: I think the biggest challenge we had in the Rexroth world was that Rexroth is a small part of Bosch—and then Rexroth Pneumatics also is a small part of Rexroth. Now we are ensuring that we’re really focusing on pneumatics. We were a small part, and also a small part of the focus for the strategy itself. [Having] pneumatic management has really dedicated the company to focusing on pneumatic applications.
Q: What will your focus be for the first year of your independent operations?
A: Obviously it’s a big deal for us. We kind of started the transition last year. Everyone has known in the last couple years that Bosch had intentions to sell us. They were looking for partners, talking to partners. Over the last year we separated ourselves out into this legal separate entity inside the Rexroth organization. For us, that meant that we had to make sure that we transitioned over all our business over to the new company. That included our customers and our distributors. That was a big focus for us initially to keep the business that we have, the customers that we have, the partners that we have.
Of course now it’s about launching a new brand. You have to focus a lot on launching our new identity, the Aventics brand, and showing the market who we are, and then building up the new brand. That’s a big, big focus for us. Our strategy is to be focused on pneumatics.
Q: Do you see new product lines or developments coming that you weren’t able to focus on while being part of Bosch Rexroth?
A: Yes. I would say that the biggest difference is that Rexroth had focus areas and they were focused on branches that didn’t necessarily mean or secure the best opportunities for pneumatics. What we are doing now is recalibrating and refocusing on where we see the best opportunities for us to grow based on our products, portfolio and our expertise. There are some areas that the Rexroth world was not really focused that we are actually emphasizing more on globally, like gas/oilfield applications. That’s an area we’ve been strong in the U.S. for many years, but now we we’re rolling that out globally. Also, healthcare, such as in on-board medical device applications. That was also an area of opportunity for pneumatics but not really the other Rexroth companies.
Q: Do you see your existing product lines staying largely the same? Will there be expansions of certain product lines or redesigns or eliminations of the lines you have now?
A: We already have our areas where we’ve been strong in the past and can expand that further, refocusing a lot on integrating electronics and pneumatics. That’s a big trend in the industry—more intelligent pneumatics. That’s definitely an area that we’ve been already doing quite a bit the last few years, kind of accelerating those efforts. For example, we have our AV 03/05 valves family, we’re now integrating proportional valve technology for that. And we’re looking at enhancing diagnostics. We have another solution, EPPS, Electro-Pneumatic Positioning System, which is really using proportional technology pressure control, for very good positioning accuracy, that’s at a very attractive price point.
Q: How will the German and the U.S. offices interact—and how independent will the U.S. operation be?
A: We’re actually really different now compared to the past. We were part of Rexroth, of course, then we were in the Matrix world. Most of the decision-making were split between the Rexroth and U.S. officers and also had to work with Germany. For us now, our organization is very lean, with not many layers. Myself and my counterpart here report directly to Germany. We have been empowered to make decisions locally, with quick escalation to the board in Germany if needed. We believe we can be quicker reacting to market needs in our new company. Of course, on strategy decisions, we’ll be discussing with our headquarters in Hanover. That’s something we’ve been focusing a lot on— strengthening that bond between [Germany] and North America, working on many levels with our colleagues and headquarters from engineering, sales, product management, logistics. There’s a lot of increased interaction between us and our headquarters.
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