Some say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, unfortunately when you have invested heavily in R&D and somebody borrows your design then flattery doesn’t make the shareholders happy (well only in a limited way). So it is that our ICP project involves people who make Aluminium stuff and the Chinese market; how do you enter this market and, when you’ve entered it, how do you prevent others re-imagining your designs? Well a good place to start as always is Dusseldorf.
Of course as an avid follower of the magical world of Aluminium you know that this week was the Aluminium 2012 conference in Dusseldorf Messe. So on Monday permission came through from our client to go to the fair and then following a quick credit card blitz two of our group found ourselves on a plane to Dusseldorf. After a day and a half we are well briefed on current feelings of the key guys in the Aluminium market, we found that an aluminium can is actually made of three types of Aluminium, a women tried to offer us a new project to become reselling agents for top quality Chinese extrusions in Europe, we networked for some potential jobs in the future and most importantly we identified a few leads on transferable business models which may be good for our client.
Now we have to make sense of all that we learnt and formulate some recommendations… Answers on a postcard please…
