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It is often true that when a product is right for a market,
gaining entry to that market will not be too difficult.
Many trade experts, on the other hand, would probably believe
that Japan is more than a little different - and generally
entry is only possible after protracted efforts.
However, May of this year saw a significant Irish exception
when Carrickmacross company Macfab
sold its first machine to a Japanese importer with surprising
speed - within just a couple of months of first contact. Not
only that, but the Japanese partner soon after exhibited it
in a trade show, with engineers from Ireland on hand to demonstrate.
Macfab makes waste compactors and balers, a business it has
been in for about 15 of its 30 years as an engineering company.
Its products have been sold in 21 countries, mostly in Europe
- but also in the USA, Australia and New Zealand and now Japan.
The specific product sold there is at the lower end of its
range - a 60kgs model with a footprint of less than a square
metre, which is designed to handle paper and packaging waste
in commercial premises such as offices and shops, garage forecourts,
restaurants and fast food outlets.
Having targeted and researched the Japanese market, Macfab
worked through the Enterprise
Ireland office in Tokyo. Cian McMahon, the company’s
business development executive, visited the country and met
a select number of potential partners identified with the
help of Enterprise Ireland .
“Our Japanese partner company Ecoss was so confident of our
suitability for their market that it made a decision very
quickly. So, last May, for the first and, indeed, only time,
we air-freighted a sample product to them,” says McMahon.
“We then flew a couple of technicians out to help our new
distributor demonstrate the machine at a waste industry show.”
The partner subsequently identified modifications that it
believed were essential for the Japanese market in the longer
term. Macfab has been working hard in recent months on a customised
model. “The bale size needed to be different and we have also
introduced a longer cylinder and made the machine fully automated,”
McMahon explains.
The full Macfab range includes compactors and balers up to
500/600kgs capacity, as well as bottle crushers and related
equipment.
“We have found that our technical and machine quality and
performance are well up to any competition from other imports
or local Japanese products,” he says. “So we have high hopes
for volume sales of the smaller models and some market penetration
for the larger machines.
"We are a smaller and more flexible company - relatively
speaking - and perhaps surprisingly, we are able to compete
strongly on price.”
Macfab has just shipped its first order for four of the new
Japanese-specified compactor/balers and is confident that
the next step will be shipping by the container load by the
turn of the year.
Source - EnviroCentre
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