|
In the past couple of years a lot of things has happened in the business. One important thing is the merging between and aquisitions of companies worldwide. Snap-on has aquired several wheel alignment manufacturers - today the Snap-On group consist of various companies with various brands, way of distribution, production facilities, managers, sales-people, etc. The Snap-on Group consist of the previous independent manufacturers - Balco, FMC (John Bean), Sun - all form the US - Hofmann from Germany and GS from Italy. Beissbarth can be symbolized as "the hot potato" in the hands
of investors. Management has neglected development of the Microline 4000-series,
which makes the technology a bit outdated. Today Beissbarth is part of
the french Facom group - the second big group - the important question
is, will Beissbarth become the monkey on the back of Facom? A third group is Corghi, who owns Mondolfo Ferro, Simpes Faip (HPA) among others. My knowledge to Corghi is unfortunately limited. It is easy to see the direction the three big groups are moving in - by aquiring all types of capital equipment manufacturers - lifts, tyre-changers, wheel-balancers, roller-brake testers, etc. - and integrate vertically by buying distribution channels, they master every business segment right to the end-user. The strategy was very well known in beginning of the 1980'ies. The well known paradigm from the 1990´ies of focusing on your core business has not been taken into consideration. E.g. Facom has wide spread activities - from business in furnitures to the automotive business - the capital equipment side of Facoms´ automotive business is still a non-profitable business. Merging and aquisitions are often followed by cost-reductions or more popular rationalizations! Until today there has been no rationalizations on the product side, that is, no products has been demolished within these two groups. During the Automechanica exhibition in 1998 it was obvious that all the brands was the same product. One can question, will this product strategy stay unchanged? In fact the only parameter differentiate is the price and service. Besides having similar products with different product names, a few manufacturers like Hofmann has their own product line - the Dynaliner products. They apply a different technology used by the three other manufacturers. What will happen with this product line in the future? Remember it takes an expensive engineering group to maintain technical service, new developments, R/D, program updates, etc. With a red numbers on the bottom line, these groups have only one way to go - rationalisations, meaning standardize products, less products. Hunter is perceived as the pioneer in wheel alignment. Hunter is still a private company, but for how long? Rumors in the market reveil that it is for sale? What will then happen to Hunter? Will they maintain their innovative strategy? What about the legal fight between Hunter and Snap-On?
The products mentioned described are the following:
Electronic turntable
Caster/King-Pin measurement
Toe system
Cable free system
Battery recharging
Wheel alignment specifications Specifications are not just numbers
Encoder for automatic detection of wheel turning
Electronic level
Software
Extented to test-line
Additional angles
Automatic test of toe-sensors
Windows-version
Price/Quality ratio ( in regards to functionality)
Hunter has a very high quality, but also a very high price.
OPTOE (equivalent to win-toe from Hunter)
|
||||||||||||