GFE flexes its muscles

01 November 2000
GFE flexes its muscles

THE Consumer & Foodservice Products Division of Glynwed owns two distinct businesses: Glynwed Foodservice Equipment (GFE) and the Aga and Leisure domestic cooking equipment business. The latter still gains the lion's share of the group's £230m turnover but GFE has become increasingly significant.

Falcon's annual sales from its extensive range of cooking equipment are thought to stand at around £30m while Williams makes around £28m from its equally diverse selection of refrigeration products. Mono Equipment, which GFE acquired this year, is a major player in bakery equipment and made about £14m in its latest year.

To caterers which have dealt with any of them, the three UK manufacturing businesses would seem to have very distinct identities and management cultures as well as differing approaches to marketing, distribution and dealership arrangements.

How easy has it been to bring them together? GFE managing director Stephen Rennie stresses that, while GFE is now the corporate identity of the total business, there is no intention to change the identity of its three UK manufacturing businesses. "Williams, Falcon and Mono are very strong names in the market and I would not dream of taking those away and replacing them with GFE", he says.

Rennie believes that no other UK manufacturing company can offer quite the same range of products and services as GFE. He also points out that multi-nationals like Hobart, Electrolux and Enodis don't have the same strengths in light equipment and sundries, which has started to prove very important in GFE's development of its GFE Online e-commerce site, introduced in April this year.

Rennie admits that there are product areas offering room for improvement, a prime example being warewashing, but the group is currently well-placed for making acquisitions.

Synergies

Various synergies are being developed across manufacturing operations, notably in purchasing of metals and components and also cooperation in areas such as manufacturing and R & D, "There are lots of similarities, for example, in the controllers used on a Falcon combi oven, a Williams blast chiller and a Mono deck oven," Rennie points out. "So our R & D people are working together to come up with joint product development initiatives in areas of overlap such as touchpad controls and programming."

There is also transfer potential in important markets like bakery and retail, as with the specification of Williams dough retarder/provers in Mono bakery schemes, and obvious scope for consolidation in areas such as doughnut fryers, a market which Williams dabbled in but where Mono has a more established and successful product line.

E-commerce

GFE Online, developed this year at a cost of around £300,000, is largely geared to business-to-business e-commerce with dealers, public sector buyers and contract caterers but trading with end-users also stands to grow as dealers are able to personalise the "front-end" of the site to their own business.

This can also be significant to large buyers. A contract caterer like Compass Group, which wants its 9,000 units to restrict buying to certain products, can have their pages tailored to the relevant GFE products, thus greatly improving their overall purchasing control.

GFE Service, another prong of GFE, developed following the takeover of Service Line in 1998 and and 2/3 of its activities involve non-group makes. But its 130 strong team of servicing specialists provide an important unifying element across the group.

Export

One area where differences are still apparent across the group is in export. Refrigeration has become a global business with Williams operating extensive manufacturing facilities in Australia and China as well as UK plus sales companies in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany and Australia and Hong Kong. The US business Victory Refrigeration which GFE purchased last year offers obvious areas for extending market influence.

By contrast, Falcon still has its main focus on the UK market although it has built up useful business in regions like the Middle East, largely through links with consultants. European penetration has been slower.

"On the cooking side, we have found that there are still a number of individual country regulations and restrictions, some of which are still quite onerous, even though CE marking is supposed to be recognised throughout Europe," Rennie comments. Links with the other GFE businesses will clearly be important in building a better foothold.

GFE

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