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Category: Ningbo Business
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Published: Sunday, 18 September 2011 22:38
News came a few days ago that the 270-butterfly-shaped wall lamp, independently developed by Ningbo UTEC Electric Appliances Company won the 2011 UK Lamp Design Award, which made a special report by BBC. “As the product was jointly developed by our design department and the French R&D center, it is a combination of both Chinese and Western styles, which is the key to the winning of the award”, said Zhu Yuehua, chairman of UTEC.
UTEC is a company engaged in production of outdoor lights, with the products going abroad 100%. In recent years, in developing new products, it has been confronted with a bottleneck: it finds it difficult to keep pace with leading companies of lights overseas. To go on imitating foreign products or develop their own products by hiring foreign talents? UTEC chose the latter.
In 2009, UTEC worked with the famous French design company-Design Pool to establish the French research and development center. “We pay the foreign talents flexibly such as awarding them according to the sale volume”, said Zhu Yuehua. Now the center has more than 30 researchers who keep developing a new product every quarter to cater to local consumers. Soon after that, UTEC spread the model to Sweden, Israel and other countries.
More than hiring foreign design talents, UTEC has also employed foreign sale talents who have expanded the markets from Middle East and South Asia to Europe and raised its yearly export volume from more than 1million dollars to nearly 10million dollars. UTEC has also set up offices abroad and holding companies in Russia, Italy and Germany, which have all achieved good economic benefits.
The foreign design and sales speed up UTEC’s reaching to the ends of the smile curve. In recent three years, the low-carbon and energy-efficient products have been replacing the traditional products at a rate of 15%. Now, more than 60% of its products are highly technical LED and solar lamps, the main profit source of the company. In the first half of this year, UTEC has successfully applied for more than 20 domestic and 22 foreign design patents.
During the first half year UTEC’s sale has achieved 181million Yuan with a year-on-year growth of 15%. The export price is more than twice that of the domestic counterparts. The UME outdoor lamp has made way to major supermarkets in EU and the independent brands sold in Germany this year has exceeded 30million, with the profit rate more than 30%.
“Enterprises should upgrade actively and update traditional products gradually rather than wait for the next crisis”, said Zhu. “UTEC will switch from OEM and ODM to OBM, trying to achieve a yearly sale volume of 1billion Yuan at the end of the twelfth five year plan period and become a world famous lighting supplier.”
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Category: Ningbo Business
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Published: Sunday, 18 September 2011 22:35
Although Christmas is still months away, quite a lot of Ningbo companies are producing at full capacity Christmas supplies. Statistics from Ningbo Customs show that in the first seven months, Ningbo exported 4,463 tons of Christmas supplies at the value of 21.09 million US dollars, up 20.4% and 18.6% respectively over the same period of last year. The exports of July stood at 11.87 million US dollars, exceeding the total of the first six months. The main destinations of exports are EU (9.258 million US dollars), the United States (3.459 million US dollars) and Brazil (2.468 million US dollars), and they accounted for 72% of the total volume of export. Private companies took the lead in exporting with a volume of 14.7 million US dollars, increasing by 19.3% over the same period of last year, and they accounted for 69.7 percent of the total. However, the exporting price declined by a small margin compared with the same period of last year. The average price of the Christmas supplies is down by 1.5%, at 4,726 US dollars per ton.
This year, the great need for Christmas supplies abroad guarantees a peak season for related enterprises. However, due to the rise of the cost caused by the appreciation of RMB, the profit margin is shrinking for many exporters in spite of the increasing foreign orders.
