Chinese test instruments manufacturer active on European feedback
Until recently, the company was only present in Europe through a network of distributors, and mostly known from hobbyists for its low-cost instruments.
Nearly a year ago, and three years after it had established an American sales and support operations office, the company opened up a European branch in Puchheim near Munich, dedicated to help its distributors and local customers. After a year in office, Wolfgang Bartels, Rigol Technologies EU GmbH’s Managing Director gave us a glimpse of the company’s view on Europe.
eeNews Europe: Being a Chinese manufacturer, you do leverage very competitive manufacturing costs. Though how is composed the design team?
Wolfgang Bartels: Our design team is mostly composed of local engineers, both veterans and new recruits from university. Some of our veteran designers have been hired from competition, sometimes abroad. One quarter of the company’s employees are R&D engineers, which means we invest a lot in the design and improvement of our instruments.
eeNews Europe: What does Europe represent as a market for you compared to the Chinese market?
W. Bartels: We have 50% of our business in China. The other half is split within the rest of Asia, Africa, America, South America, Canada and Europe. Our highest growth rate is in the US and in Europe.
eeNews Europe: Having established a European presence, what are your revenue trend expectations?
W. Bartels: Since we opened our European office, in October 2011, our sales in Europe have experienced a double digit growth. Because we are able to offer local customer support as well as product trainings and application consulting, our distributors can be much more proactive which benefits our end customers. We also have a small warehouse in Puchheim which enables us to offer a faster response than other Asian manufacturers for units’ replacement or repair.
eeNews Europe: Is this new office going to change the design input for future instruments and what sort of feedback specific to Europe did you get so far? Do you plan to produce instruments more specifically targeted at the European market?
W. Bartels: Most of the instruments we sell now were designed before our European office opened, but since we’ve had a direct presence in Europe, we’ve been able to get better feedback from our European customers and our R&D center in China is taking this into consideration. Our next generation of mid- and high-range instruments will address more of the needs specific to the European industrial and automotive industries. We are also able to better respond to customer requests such as software support and updates, sometimes providing them with PC-based data processing solutions tailored to their applications. Calibration is also a big issue in Europe and with our instruments, we help various calibration labs to comply with the ISO standards.
eeNews Europe: Do you design the data acquisition and signal processing chips at the core of your test instruments?
W. Bartels: Rigol uses standard components such as off-the-shelf FPGAs and ADCs.
eeNews Europe: Who are your most direct competitors in Europe and how do you plan to gain market shares?
W. Bartels: Our goal is to increase our market share mostly through better brand awareness. Because we compete across the whole spectrum of digital oscilloscopes, waveform generators, spectrum analysers, digital multimeters, we have to be very active. In fact, we also sell to Original Device Manufacturers (ODMs), which means that brands that you would think are our competitors are in fact our customers too. We now organize seminars, more customer trainings, we release whitepapers, applications notes and videos that we push to our local distributors. We are also working on a new website – https://eu.rigol.com – with several local languages to choose from. Of course, we are also exhibiting at European shows, like electronica and Embedded World for instance. The hobbyist market is quite big in Europe, and because most hobbyists also work for a company, they are a good entry into the corporate market.
Visit Rigol at www.rigol.com and at electronica (Munich, Nov. 13-16, Hall A1-259)
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