theceomagazine.com | 73Generally, I don’t micromanage. But I’m very
hard when it comes to expectations. I have
high expectations of my staff.
Over the years, have there been any
industries that are not part of your
background that you’ve developed an
interest in as you’ve learned more
about them?
The job allows me to learn a lot about the
various industries and divisions that I’m
involved in. Of course, I get a lot of
information and training from my general
managers who are specialists in their
respective industries.
Even within the Tower Cranes business,
which is my specialty area, the things we
do have changed over the years. We used
to just sell and provide after-sales service for
the machines we manufacture. Because of
changing needs and market demand, however,
we have now gone one step further. For
example, we are into the rental business for
tower cranes, which we didn’t do in the past,
but it’s just necessary now because the supply
chain is getting shorter.
What strategies are you putting forward
to ensure Liebherr Singapore remains
competitive into the future?
I think the Liebherr Group has only a small
part of its turnover in Asia – about 10 per
cent. It definitely wants to do more in Asia
over the next few years, so we will be
investing and looking at increasing our land
sites. We have a chance to buy those sites, so
we are talking to the Singapore Government
about them right now.
If everything goes smoothly, we should be
able to do a few things. We want to increase
our repair capabilities for the Aerospace
Division. Currently, we have a repair shop,
but we want to do more, including landing
gears. Basically, we want to serve our regional
aerospace customers better and maintain our
service to increase the new product line at
some point, such as the 350 Advance and
Bombardier C Series.
We want to build Liebherr Singapore into
a regional rental hub for tower cranes. We
bought our dealer in Hong Kong, Shriro
Machinery, three years ago. Now we have a
rental fleet of about 50 units of tower cranes
in Hong Kong. We want to increase that and
spread it Asia-wide, beyond Hong Kong.
For the Mobile Cranes Division, we want
to build a repair hub in Singapore to better
serve our customers in this region. And then,
in other divisions, like Appliances, we want to
go into direct selling through ecommerce.
This is the plan of the group moving
forward. Overall, we hope to synchronise
all of Liebherr’s efforts for the Asia region
as well.“LBBW is proud to have
Liebherr as one of its key
customers. Our cooperation
over several decades is based
on many shared values,
such as fair and trustworthy
partnership and innovation.
We look forward to continuing
this successful collaboration.”- Landesbank Baden-
Wurttemberg