Insight

A review and preview of the global fastener market

Named after the Roman god who is often depicted as having two faces – due to its ability to look to the future and to the past – the Janus Perspective is a unique feature that includes a wide cross section of global fastener business leaders, who have all contributed their retrospective of 2019 and thoughts on prospects and challenges for 2020.

Florian Birkenmayer, speaker of the board of directors

Over the past few years, the fischer Group of Companies has seen continuous growth. In 2010, we generated a gross turnover of €582 million. By 2018, we managed to increase this figure to €864 million, generated by around 5,200 employees all over the world.

We have successfully closed the 2019 financial year with yet another turnover increase. The fixing systems division, which is the largest of our, in total, five business divisions, contributed much to this growth, particularly in Europe. In the Middle East and Asia, on the other hand, we saw our turnover fall.

Generally speaking, we did very well over the past year – especially in view of the many political and economical changes that will also still continue to affect us in the future, whether it is the trade dispute between the USA and China, punitive tariffs, BREXIT or the general decline of the global economic growth. All of these developments will also impact directly or indirectly on our company. However, fischer always addresses any problems on the horizon quickly and with outstanding foresight.

We therefore have already developed and implemented effective measures at an early stage that will help us to also master these challenges in 2020, including continuous process optimisations, as well as the development and market launch of new product lines and services for our partners. Additions in the warehousing and logistics area, and to our production capacities, will also ensure that we are particularly close to the markets where we and our customers are already active, and to the markets in other regions where we see potential. This contributes to resource saving and to being able to continue to guarantee outstanding availability and an excellent delivery service.

We have generally noticed that, in view of the rapidly changing and globalised market, in-house innovation capacity and technology expertise are constantly gaining in importance. With our new products, we therefore intend to continue to set high international benchmarks in terms of level of innovativeness, safety, quality and ease of use. Add our professional service to this, and we will consistently continue to prove our competitive advantage. Under consideration of specific regional requirements, we will thereby manage to establish ourselves even further in our growth markets as well as in other regions.

We also see scope for growth in the project and infrastructure area. Megatrends such as ‘digitalisation’ harbour opportunities in this respect, which we at fischer intend to use. BIM (Building Information Modelling) is changing the project business, which is an important area with respect to our turnover targets. We are successfully participating in this trend. We have already experienced how BIM sped up the construction progress, improved the quality and reduced the costs in projects all over the world. We are making BIM compatible product data available and are currently training our staff in the use of this new digital planning method. Our respective positioning is supported by communication measures. Our BIM strategy takes past experiences from all of the 47 international subsidiaries in 35 countries that belong to our group of companies on board.

We are also providing a free design software called FIXPERIENCE that is updated and optimised on an ongoing basis. Newly published design and measurement regulations are continuously taken into account by the programme in order to be able to provide the respective proof with regard to the applicable standards. In addition, we are offering digital services such as plug finder Apps for DIYers and professionals – in our opinion, this digital services area harbours major future potential, and we will continue to expand it in 2020. We also intend to increase our activities within the start-up area. We are currently successfully advancing our digitalisation strategy with our new App Craftnote, which is aimed at tradespeople. It summarises all of the information pertaining to a job and makes it available to everyone involved.

Besides our attractive in store product displays, we are also offering our retail partners comprehensive support in the e-commerce area. We are continuously expanding these services, as our own financial success depends on whether our partners continue to be equipped for the future in this era of digitalisation. Apart from sales support, our customer consultation, care and training measures also continue to remain important. fischer is the technological market leader in some key fixing technology fields. A high-level of brand awareness provides an excellent starting point for further growth, and we are in a strong position for the future.