Upgrade equipment
Automation to cope with labor shortages
Since March this year, Foshan Kezhimei Furniture Co., LTD. (hereinafter referred to as "Kezhimei"), whose main business is the research and development and production of office chairs and children's study desks and chairs, has witnessed a boom of overseas business. Its overseas sales from January to August have increased by two times compared with the same period last year.
According to Luo Huiping, deputy general manager of The company, this has something to do with the rise of home and office work overseas during the epidemic.In order to prevent and control the epidemic, many offline shops in overseas countries have closed down, and some foreign enterprises provide home-based office subsidies in order to encourage employees to work from home, thus prompting the rigid demand for online home-based office furniture.
There is no doubt that this online office trend is a market opportunity for The company, which has been building its own brand since 2011 and insists on independent research and development.
Just last year, The company hired a new group of researchers, and its corporate research and development team grew to more than 50 people, accounting for more than a sixth of the total, covering fields such as electronic information and industrial design."We have the largest research and development team in Asia, by some estimates."Spending on research and development of smart seats this year will also double from last year, Luo said.
Luo Huiping said, chose to intensify investment in research and development, because the market resources in recent years to industry head enterprises is increasingly concentrated, if do not have the core competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises, will (would) lose the living space in the market competition, so to speed up the r&d and production of high-end products become the option, will strive to make enterprises among the head as soon as possible.
In addition to strengthening the research and development of intelligent seat products, Division Zhimei is also stepping up the automatic transformation of production equipment.
Last year, The company invested more than 15 million yuan to purchase a batch of mechanical arms. After the installation was completed in January this year, they were put into use in March after a period of debugging. The mechanical arms greatly reduced the burden of workers in handling, laying out, plastic injection machine grasping and other links, and the retention rate of employees also improved.
"The labor shortage has become more pronounced since the outbreak of the epidemic, and it is necessary to carry out automatic reform as soon as possible."Luo huiping said.
A robotic arm welds the brackets for a children's learning desk in the Division Wisdom workshop.Contribution from interviewees
A robotic arm welds the brackets for a children's learning desk in the Division Wisdom workshop.Contribution from interviewees
The company's confidence in investing in r&d, innovation and automation is related to the rapid growth of the market for office furniture and children's desks and chairs.
"Foshan Nanhai District National Manufacturing Industry invisible champion development Evaluation White Paper" proposed, the current furniture industry in the office furniture market scale has exceeded 200 billion yuan, in the past six years, the annual compound growth of about 13%;In the past three years, the market size of children's learning desks and chairs has grown by about 30% annually, and the purchase volume of school furniture has increased by 60% year-on-year in 2019.
Luo Huiping believes that China, as the largest producer and consumer country, will have an increasing demand for the improvement of office environment in the secondary and tertiary industries in the future. More enterprises will buy high-quality office desks and chairs to improve production efficiency and employee retention, which will bring good news to the manufacturers of office desks and chairs with independent r&d ability.
To this end, komei is also stepping up the layout of offline sales channels, and continues to carry out marketing activities on Tmall, pinduoduo, douyin and other online shopping platforms as well as cross-border e-commerce.