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Air conditioning: comment
Time to escape your comfort zone?
The benefits to installers, consultants and the industry in general of using lesser known brands can be immense. All we have to do is overcome decades of prejudice and get people to move outside their comfort zones, argues managing director of Gree UK Roberto Mallozzi
L
et’s get something straight from the start, I have no problem with the big air conditioning brands. They have done a fabulous job, both for their own equipment and the industry in general, often with the help of the visibility of the brand in other sectors. However, the time has come for installers and consultants to break the comfortable habit of only looking at the big brands. Back in the 70s, virtually every car on British
roads came from Ford, Vauxhall or British Leyland; Japanese cars were a joke and Korean ones were unheard of. The first people to buy Datsuns were treated as naïve, or looked on as being unable to afford anything better. Last year Japanese brands sold nearly half a million new cars in the UK. The prejudice was not entirely unfounded at the
time, as to hit a price point, the cars were made cheaply, and corners were cut. Unfortunately, some air conditioning units from China and other developing countries have suffered from the same prejudice. They have a lower price, so they must be second rate. At Gree UK, we get this all the time, even though
everyone who goes around the production and R&D facilities is impressed by the professionalism, quality and cutting-edge technology, but, to some people, the fact that it is from China is an unsurmountable hurdle. Our technical guys often come across people who say they have had bad experiences with lower cost brands, but when they push a bit further, it is usually a friend of a friend, or just something they heard. Certainly, these newer, less familiar names may be ‘different’, but that does not make them ‘worse’. Many of the manufacturers of these ‘different’ brands are just as keen on quality and as proud of their reputation as the better-known brand names, and some of them are not small at all. Gree is considered a ‘different’ brand in this country, but it manufactures one in three of all the air conditioning units sold throughout the world, turns over more than US$24 billion and has an 8,000-person-strong R&D department.
The truth is that most of these lesser known
brands are as easy to install, as robust, as reliable and as technically advanced as the better-known equipment.
As well as prejudice, there is an understandable
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reluctance to go with brands you do not know. Installers get used to working with one or two particular brands and, on the whole, they are loyal to those manufacturers; they are familiar with their capabilities, they build a relationship with their suppliers and their engineers are trained on those units. However, some of the lesser known brands, such as Gree, have just as much training support and technical backup as the big boys.
The bottom line is, of course, the bottom line. If these new brands and their infrastructure are just as good as the better-known equipment, but significantly lower in price, what could the effects be on the industry in general and individual businesses in particular?
By taking a little time to investigate these lesser known brands, installers can either bring quotes for systems right down to beat their competition or use the lower purchase price to increase their margins – or do a little of both. For consultants, even though fees are sometimes
a percentage of the contract value, it cannot do a consultant’s commercial image any harm if he or
she gets a reputation for consistently bringing in installations below budget. With smaller customers, such as
restaurants, shops, dentists and so on, it is not just a case of which installer will win the contract, but whether there will be a contract in the first place.
I am writing this with an outside
temperature of over 30ºC, so I know many of you will be struggling to keep up with demand from potential customers who want air
conditioning by the end of the day, or the following day at the latest. With normally scheduled work and emergency repairs, it is almost impossible to satisfy this demand at the time, which leaves you trying to reschedule these new installations at a later date, by which time the weather may have cooled down and the discomfort faded in the meantime. By then the cost of a new installation may look like something that the customer can do without at the moment. After all, there will be months of winter and could next summer possibly be as bad? Having a brand in your armoury that can significantly reduce the cost gives you much more of a chance to convert these emergency calls into solid business.
September 2018
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