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Get together quickly
Per Henriksen, Managing Director of Sander Plast A/S and member of the Hub North executive committee advises members of the business network to get together as quickly as possible
Hub North executive committee member appeals to the members to get together in different business models to ensure that the large wind turbine manufacturers remain in northern Denmark.
“Hub North is very important”.
It can be expressed so precisely and understated when the words come from Per Henriksen of Nibe. He is managing director of Sander Plast A/S in Nibe and also the chair of the Business Leaders Forum at Aalborg Samarbejdet and a member of the Hub North executive committee.
At the network meeting on November 30, he went full speed, this time in the form of a number of insightful and informative speeches from professors and a number of businesspeople.
“I really feel that I am coming from the lowest link in the food chain. I lead Denmark's oldest injection moulding company and we deliver to Siemens, among others. Portugal and China are among our customers. They come with a sketch and we come up with something based on it”.
Per Henriksen characterizes Sander Plast as a busieness with a simple concept and not a lot of rocket science.
“Development has only gone from bakelite to 10,000 different raw materials. We have injection moulding, mould production, development and assembly in the business. There are 19 production lines and can handle anything from a few grams to two kilos at a time. We tussle with what all of the brightest minds have thought up and we earn the most money by saying no”.
Per Henriksen encourages cooperation and innovation among subcontractors in the wind turbine industry. Warehousing is the code word.
“We subcontractors need to do things much differently if we all want to survive. A network such as Hub North is therefore very important because we need to get together in a few business models so we can match the large manufacturers such as Siemens and Vestas. It will be a hard fight but we need to create a match that the large manufacturers think they can be a part of”.
“Siemens, for eksempel, cannot handle so many subcontractors individually, as we exist now. We must get together in a a few business models that work. The example of Skykon is scary because here are 20 smaller contractors on the verge of collapsing with the large business. Our Hub North can play an important role here if we can get together in the right way in time. Then we can maintain Siemens up here and we can maintain jobs”, says Per Henriksen to Hub North.
Polish circus people
The jobs at his own company have had a precarious time in recent years.
“We were 50. Now we have 23 employees. Those are the sad remains after a crisis. Now we have reorganized and have been thrown some capital. In that way, we have become a sharper, but also a weaker company. It is a crazy challenge each day. The first thought in the morning and in the evening is: 'Do we have cash on hand?'”, says Per Henriksen.
Sander Plast has annual sales of 30 million Danish kroner. Twenty-five percent of products goes to export.
“Viewed as such, production is simple. We still warm some granules up, press them together a bit and then something comes out on the other end. On the other hand, material development has been enormous since August Sanders' Bakelite factory was founded in 1934 when a great many of the workers were Polish circus people who only received some beer for working after the circus season ended”, says Per Henriksen.
The first bakelite presser in Denmark's oldest injection moulding company, Sander Plast in Nibe
Poor image
A poor image as polluters and procuders of non-degradable materials has always plagued the industry but that is grossly unfair says the plastic director.
“As a matter of fact, we belong to a group of the most green industry people who have had concepts such as a green future, recycling, biotechnology, degradability and CO2 minimization at the top of the agenda for a long time. Think that there are up to 400 kg of plastic in a car today and that it must be possible to recycle 80 percent of it. Basically we can press plastic items from sunflower seeds”.
Thirty percent of production at Sander Plast goes to the wind turbine industry.
“The industry is by far our largest area investment area. Plastic has 80 percent of steel's tensile strength so we are talking about monumental potential and an area for growth. But all of us subcontractors need to act like the supermarkets and get together with the products. That's the only option we have to match the wind turbine industry's largest manufacturers”, says Per Henriksen.
