Howard Grindrod | THE KBBREVIEW INTERVIEW


oward Grindrod has 30 years’ experience in the appliances industry with Frigidaire, Fridgemaster, AEG, Toshiba and now Hisense, which as well as appliances makes TVs, soundbars, mobile phones, heating and air conditioning and medical equipment. He joined Hisense UK in 2012 and in that time has seen


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turnover triple and brand awareness grow, thanks in part to some major sports sponsorship deals. The $30 billion (£23,857 bn) Chinese giant has around 100,000 employees worldwide and extensive manufacturing and R&D sites in Europe. It owns Gorenje in Slovenia and is now beginning a major push into the kitchen studio market with its new built-in products. He tells kbbreview about his role at Hisense, the brand’s progress in the UK and his plans for the future of the brand in the UK.


Q & A


Q: How would you describe your role as vice-president of Hisense UK? A: A facilitator. I always joke that my main job is to make other people look good. But it is very much to coordinate the team, across all the multiple facets of the business.


I work in conjunction with my Chinese colleagues who have provided those links back to China, but we have had to link that to what we do at the front end of the business. Number-one job is making sure that Hisense UK is as successful as possible and to use the resources of Hisense International and Hisense Group to make that happen.


This is very much a business that is the sum of its parts. We have


the manufacturing side and since our takeover of Gorenje, that now includes Europe. Prior to that, most MDA production was in China. In the early days, the main objective was to make sure that we had product that was fi t for purpose in the UK market.


Q: When you first took the helm, what were your goals and aspirations for Hisense? A: To be honest, in the early days it was very much survival. We were coming out of the recession and as the groundwork to set up the business was being done in 2011, there was no real appetite for new brands.


People had taken a bit of a battering during the recession and a lot of companies had not done very well, businesses had gone bankrupt. Retailers wanted to stick with what they knew best and rebuild relationships with traditional partners. It was fairly tough.


My function was to get around as many people as possible to explain who we were and our plans for the future. We had a range of products, but it wasn’t necessarily the range of products we needed to put ourselves fi rmly in that mid to premium bracket that was not only our aspiration, but also where we naturally fi tted.


Our products in the home market and in other markets were very much mid to premium. We started with refrigeration. Refrigeration paid our bills. That was my background, and it was a market where we had some traction in the UK through OEM supply. I was an OEM buyer with Frigidaire and Fridgemaster. Hisense Corporation is absolutely 100% a tech corporation and that is very important to us, but there was a huge amount of work to be done to fi t our product into the white-goods ecosystem of the UK


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March 2024 •


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