Carl Modigh, President of Habia Cable:
Focus on sustainable transportation
A new, more agile organization. More investments in equipment and product development. But above all, new, exciting initiatives in sustainable transportation. This is how Carl Modigh summarizes the situation at Habia Cable.
What will your focus be for 2021?
Habia is continuing to focus on its concept for temperature-resistant, high-voltage cables, which we previously developed for the offshore sector. We see excellent potential for this concept – which we refer to as Zeroarc™ – in other industries, such as customers specializing in electrified and sustainable transportation.
The defense market is also continuing to grow. We already command a strong position in this market, but plan to develop more cable products, including products for military vehicles. In 2021, construction will also start on a new plant in Poland, which will entail a major capacity expansion. This will provide us with better production flows in our current operations as well as scope for future expansion.
In China, our efforts to grow beyond the telecom sector and broaden our customer base for industrial cables are continuing. We see opportunities here to supply global customers in China with locally manufactured products.
What strengths and areas for improvement have you taken with you from the pandemic in 2020?
We have seen how well our new organization functions. It is centered around Habia’s plants, where we have concentrated more functions and given our plant managers clearer profit and business responsibility. This expanded responsibility has given us better cost control. This is also one of the reasons we were able to make major savings that ensured Habia’s profitability in 2020.
Thanks to this new way of working, we are also able to react even more quickly to market changes and customer inquiries, which are now handled at the plants, where the real production know-how is found. This is possible since we now have better control over the supply chain – from initial inquiry to final delivery. Our success in this regard is reflected in the high ratings we receive in our regular customer surveys.
In 2020, we also made new investments in equipment and product development in Sweden and Germany, which feels particularly positive when times are tough.
