Your humble editor sat down at Light + Building with leadership from the Nordeon Group. Pierre van Lamsweerde, CEO, Ton DeVries, Business Development Manager,
Terry O’Toole, Managing director, .hess America at the EdisonReport studio. Below is our conversation:
Randy: Pierre, tell our audience a little about the companies and the factories that Nodreon Group has recently acquired.
Pierre: We have been acquiring lighting factories from Philips, but more important is the reason we did this. With LED, the industry has kind of created a destructive state, which is a position that opens a window of opportunity in this market. Had we of entered three years earlier, LED would not have been attractive enough. Had we entered three or four years later, the cards would be against us. We wanted to enter this market, but we also wanted to enter it with experience. Hess gave us a presence in the US market, we added VULKAN in 2013,, a residential outdoor company. We added Griven out of Italy in 2015. Last, we added the German, office lighting specialist, Wila.
Randy: Tom, tell us your role, which is a bit unusual by US standards.
Ton: I am working for Varova Investments, the hands-on investment company behind the Nordeon Group. We tend to step in ourselves into the business and try to develop the business especially where we see a lot of opportunity. That’s why I took the challenge two years ago and joined Nordeon Group. We brought a few products to LIGHTFAIR to try to understand what products make sense in the U.S., and we launched some of those products at LIGHTFAIR last year.
Randy: Tell us a little about the Nordeon Group in the US and how the company works together.
Terry: The best thing is we have a good platform and .hess is well established. We started in 1970 and have a strong foundation of reps. Essentially, the product lines we are acquiring now are in sync with what we already do. In essence, we could go to the same market with the same representatives, to the same specifiers, selling the product. We have a good solid team in place and have a platform which to launch. We are using our same facility and adding more skus, so space is tight, but this is a good problem to have.
Randy: Pierre, let’s talk about the future. You are from the Netherlands, what do you see that Philips did not see, as you are acquiring lighting companies.
Our model is to keep our agility and customer focus on small and medium enterprises. With the acquired companies, we keep their brands, their portfolios, their identities, and we strengthen them on the back end. We don’t integrate everything to give it one flavor. They keep their unique identity.
We acquired GRIVEN in MAR 2015 and within two months we were already active in the US. We create the best of both worlds in that we have small to medium sized businesses that are very agile, yet they have the strength of a big company.
Randy: Ton, tell us a little about the Light-line systems product.
Ton: It was the biggest product for Philips in the European market, and it is really a very clever system. But it has not been used much in the US as we use other types of linear systems.
Randy: Tell our audience a little about the products you are launching.
Ton: We have a tsunami of new products. First, is the ARINI from .hess, a completely new way to light up urban environments, and it was inspired by nature. ARINI is a very special solution and takes away clutter. A public square can be lit with fewer luminaires. Wi-Fi, security and audio are built in, so the Arini can see, communicate, entertain and inform.
From VULKAN, we make light out of wind. Wind turbine generates the energy for illumination.
GRIVEN is showing what a tremendous company they are as they feature JASPER, which is a versatile, elegant spotlight with high light output and is available in a very narrow or a wide beam. One can see the narrow beam from 600-700 feet away.
The MoLED GRAPHIC fixture is an in-ground LED luminaire that makes endless patterns and graphics possible, supporting any visual concept. It is a very small recessed very small RBG graphic fixture, unique in that you don’t really see it.
Randy: Thank you very much, gentlemen.