INTERVIEW: MIKE WALKER, MARTIN PROFESSIONAL
friendly than lamps in different ways, although there’s still a lot of discussion about what and how much. So while we’ve been involved
in LED for quite some time, we’ve just brought out one of our most important lamp- based lights ever: the MAC Viper, a 1,000W system, which is going to be an industry workhorse. LED hasn’t got up to the 26,000 lumens output that a lamp can still give you. It will do some day.
What do you think is going to happen in the market in terms of the number of players? We had to restructure our business, I guess, because we were so dominant and so big that when a recession hits, the biggest is going to feel it the most. All we’ve done is get ourselves into a very agile and nimble shape, the right size for the market. Whether other companies have to do that, I don’t know. Whether there is any appetite for bigger players to buy up smaller players to give them extra bits of market – I don’t think that happens in a shrinking or a flat market, so until the economy picks up I don’t think you’re really going to see much of that going on.
batches of LEDs we can get, then we spend half a million quid on a camera which looks at them all together with a load of other lights or a load of video screens, and we tweak them individually. Wherever you buy our LED lights, it exactly matches one that you bought six months ago, or you’re going to buy next year; or on our video screens, from panel to panel, from batch to batch, if you put a white field on them, it’s white on this one, it’s white on the next – exactly the same photometrics are coming off each one.
It’s a big differentiator from other manufacturers, and particularly from cheaper products that are coming in from overseas. Incidentally, we recently closed down our Chinese operation – every light with a Martin badge is now made in Denmark.
Are you committed to the top end of the market, or is there any scope in coming down? We are committed to the top end. We saw LED as a huge growth area, and inevitably all lighting would have an LED variant at some point. As a
lighting manufacturer you’ve got to get behind that. We got behind it with a €3 million investment which we split with the University of Aalborg in Denmark as a project to develop sustainable future lighting instruments, out of which came our current range of LED lights.
What do you mean by sustainable in that context? It means delivering lower power demands, lower lifetime costs and no lamp replacement. It’s generally accepted that LEDs are more environmentally
How much business do you do in fixed install versus events? In the entertainment market, it’s easy to measure year on year how you’re performing. The installation market for us is certainly growing, but you can do lots of really good little
jobs and then a couple of huge ones spike the figures in a way that make it difficult to forecast next year’s business. Generally it’s a market that
we’re very interested in, and we’ve got some products that make us stand out from the competition. We don’t have an awful lot of competition with the products that we have, so it’s a nice space to operate in.
Your main UK sales office is in Long Lane near London’s Covent Garden, but you also have an office in London SE1, which is about to relocate. What’s the story there? We are currently sub-letting offices from one of our customers, which was a temporary move from 2009. We’ve found premises close by which suit our purposes better, so we’re going to move there from 24 September. The London Bridge Quarter,
as they’re calling it, is quite a trendy place to be. There’s a lot of media, architectural practices, design businesses in the area and the Shard has gone up. We found that since we moved into SE1, it’s a really easy place to get to and people like visiting us here. We found the ideal offices very close to where we started, so we’re really happy with it.
Are you going to put up a media facade outside? It’s a listed building, so we can’t! One day…
www.martin.com ONLINE EXTRA
Mike Walker talks about why the UK doesn’t like media facades, and the company’s progress in the transition to LED
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info@newhank.com October 2012 21
‘Convergence in the control domain is a reality already – it’s only going to grow’
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