5
What would you say are the biggest challenges when
entering
a market such as the Chinese?
AAK is a global company with strong capabilities and application
know-how. At the same time, food products in China
are very local when it comes to flavor, taste and mouthfeel.
Therefore, we must be able to transfer global technologies
into local applications, and in order to do so, we need a very
strong customer innovation team in China. We have made
progress in this area but overall we are still on a learning
curve. With the inauguration of our new factory, we quickly
need to establish a world-class operation team to achieve
operational excellence in Zhangjiagang with both high quality
and cost efficiency.
What is AAK’s short-term goal for its China operations and
what do you expect in the longer term?
Thanks to the relentless efforts of the entire AAK China team
we have been achieving healthy growth this year compared
to last year. Our short-term goal for the coming year is to
continue to gain trust from our customers in China to become
their co-development partner, especially with products from
our newly inaugurated Zhangjiagang plant. In the longer run,
our goal is to become an innovation leader and a quality
leader in the Chinese market contributing our share to the
growth and to the continuous modernization of the Chinese
food industry.