Today we visited Sandvik in Mebane, and it was a very impressive company. Sandvik is a world-leading high technology engineering group, that was founded in 1862 in Sandviken, Sweden. They manufacture advanced special alloys and ceramic materials, with subsidiaries in over 60 countries and are represented in more than 130 countries worldwide. Sandvik has five divisions throughout out the whole company, construction, machining solutions, materials technology, mining and venture. Throughout these 5 divisions there are 49,000 employees and then they are broken-down onto subdivisions at each plant. The biggest market for Sandvik is mining, which accounts for 40% of their sales. The company has been innovating new products throughout the years, in 2007 Diamond Innovations, 2009 Wolfram Bergban, 2011 Shanbao and in 2012 Seco Tools. From what we saw, it is clear that Sandvik has it all going on and knows exactly what they have to do to stay so successful.
The mission statement for Sandvik is really about safety first and their main objective is zero harm to their people, the environment they work in, their customers and their suppliers. They pride themselves on how well they can do so, they also have four key standards; ambition, speed, focus and globalize. Sandvik strives for an open mind, team spirit and fair play in all of the work that is done in the plant. They also state that they shall develop, manufacture and market processed products.
Sandvik as a whole company sells to all sorts of companies, such as Caterpillar, GE and almost every other possible company. The Mebane plant does not sell product, but rather manufactures and ships products to a company based out of Kentucky. This is different from all the other companies we have visited, because they do not have a direct customer.
The customer values the quality of Sandvik products above all else, and that is because their products may not be the cheapest but they are the best quality. They also value the fact hat Sandvik has a proven track record in premium segments and they enjoy the fact that Sandvik tries to be seen as a customers partner.
The results for Sandvik are amazing, they are the leader in their perspective field and received the Gold Award in 2011. They also started as a small company and in 2008 they doubled in size and purchase a large amout of land around them. When looking at the five divisions, construction makes 8% profit, machining solutions makes 22% profit, materials technology 4%, mining 16% and venture 17%. They are a publicly traded company, and since they are from Sweden all of their finances are in Swedish terms and money has to be converted.
The plans for this plant in Mebane are to double in size again in the near future and plan to focus on efficiency and growth, technology and engineering, and production and flow-groups. Sandvik wants to increase customization and lower batch quantities. There is also a focus on emerging markets as a stronger global force, increased wealth, increased energy consumption, and industrial innovations. The biggest plan for Sandvik is to expand East and West from its centralized location in Europe, to the US and Asia.
Follow
