Five Years of ‘Works When You Do’

When GeoMax arrived on the international stage in 2008, many experts doubted whether there was room in the surveying market for another brand alongside the established big players. Now, five years and a major worldwide economic crisis later, GeoMax has secured its place in the sector. From the beginning, the company’s aim was to serve the fast-growing mid-range segment. In line with its ‘works when you do’ concept, GeoMax’s products are focused on offering an attractive price-to-performance ratio. This five-year milestone represents the ideal opportunity to reflect on the past and take a closer look at the future.

As indicated by the tagline on its logo, GeoMax is part of Hexagon Group. Based in Sweden, the Hexagon Group is a leader in multidimensional measurements within the macro and micro segments of the international measurement and positioning market, and comprises more than 40 well-known companies. With close to 2,500 employees working in R&D across the Hexagon Group, GeoMax had access to a wide variety of technologies and know-how, and this support helped GeoMax to build up a broad product portfolio covering the entire range of the surveying and construction market within a short time. From motorised total stations, GPS/GNSS, manual total stations and digital and optical levels and theodolites to rotating lasers and software, GeoMax covers all the main technologies and is one of just a handful of players in the market able to provide a complete package of products.

In addition to its Swiss headquarters, GeoMax operates offices in several European countries, as well as the United States, India, China and Brazil. Just recently, a new logistics centre was opened in Germany to serve the international market. When it comes to production, GeoMax is able to build on the strong competences that exist within the Hexagon Group. With production facilities in Europe, Southeast Asia and China, GeoMax has the leverage and flexibility of an international player to optimise production.

Balancing price and performance
The company’s aim of offering high quality at a competitive price may seem like a contradiction, but to GeoMax they are two sides of the same coin. Alois Geierlehner, director of business development, explains: “Our target is to reach the best price-to-performance ratio in the industry. This implies that we have to be efficient in everything we are doing. Quality is therefore not simply a slogan we include in our brochures, but is rather an implicit part of our strategy. If you do things right the first time, you don’t need to spend time fixing them afterwards. Thanks to the low failure rate of our instruments, not having to spend time on fixing problems means that we can be more efficient in developing and producing new instruments. This is where our customer benefits are twofold: low costs on the one hand and stable quality on the other. Best price-to-performance does not mean being the cheapest, it means concentrating on and balancing what’s essential. For us, ‘works when you do’ means that we aim to deliver our customers what they need and not what looks nice on a technical data sheet.”

Geographical expansion

Underlining GeoMax’s growth in recent years and its presence in most markets worldwide, GeoMax is a familiar face at all major exhibitions, either directly or in co-operation with its regional partners. Price-to-performance is the credo, but this does not mean that the GeoMax brand mainly focuses on emerging markets; the European and American markets in particular are becoming increasingly sensitive to price and total cost of ownership too. This also explains why GeoMax has bucked the general trend in the industry to display solid growth combined with rapid geographical expansion. “A crisis is clearly always a time of change, and we are seeing this change reflected in how customers assess new equipment to work with: they investigate, compare and choose very carefully. In this process, they are also open for new, good and solid offers, and this is where GeoMax comes in,” says Alois Geierlehner.

GeoMax began in the ‘traditional’ surveying market, but soon spread it wings from there to cover the construction and mapping segments too. The launch of the motorised total station as well as two new GNSS series last year expanded the GeoMax offering towards the upper segment. But this does not necessarily mean a new focus for GeoMax on the high-end segment; instead, the latest product introductions were aimed at completing the company’s range. The target, to serve the mid-range level of the market, will continue to be the driving force behind product development and distribution set-up. This was also emphasised by a new entry-level manual total station that was launched at the beginning of this year to expand the lower-end offering.

Intergeo 2012
GeoMax will also be exhibiting at Intergeo 2012 in Germany at the beginning of October, and visitors can expect the company to be focusing on two main segments of expansion: GIS and construction. Alois Geierlehner explains: “We see that a lot of tasks traditionally done by surveyors are now in the hands of foremen and others – this is a trend we see especially in more mature markets. Take a typical job of laying pipes: a surveyor driving two hours to a construction site to measure the 50 metres of new pipes laid in one day, having the whole construction crew waiting for him to finally close the trench and driving back for another two hours is a very inefficient set-up. If you equip the foreman with a GNSS system he is able to perform the task on his own, and the overall saving more than compensates for the cost of the equipment. But to achieve this, you need simple and efficient software for the foreman to work with.” With the introduction of its XPad Construction software this summer, GeoMax provided a taste of what customers can expect at the show.

When asked about the target for the next five years, the answer is simple: “growth – in all relevant parts of the business.” This includes expanding the existing product offering to cope with changing user requirements and to allow customers to choose from a wider range. The company also intends to grow in terms of tailor-made solutions, whereby software will play a vital part. And finally, its growth encompasses wider geographical coverage by simply filling in the gaps on the GeoMax map and strengthening its existing distribution channels.