NL
One of the goals outlined in Strategy 2025 is to expand and accelerate our presence in the forest and grass care (F&G) industry. F&G Project Manager Jelle Brandsma explains the steps taken during 2021 and the outlook for 2022.
F&G is a growing market. Across Europe, the number of professional landscaping companies, for instance, has grown at a rate of 4-5% year on year for the past ten years, with the market size growing at a similar rate. F&G is not an entirely new market to Kramp, since we carried out our first acquisition in the sector 25 years ago. “We were already seeing growth in F&G without even targeting the market or developing our assortment,” says Jelle. “Inevitably, as the market grows, so has our turnover in that area. F&G expansion forms part of our renewed strategy. There are many similarities between agriculture and F&G – the customer base, our assortment – and there’s no dominant player in Europe, which offers us an opportunity to leverage our existing strengths to take on that role. Our job as project team was to substantiate the theory.”
“Agriculture works on a larger scale than F&G, with larger dealers providing larger and more expensive equipment. In F&G there are a lot of very local, smaller players. This is both a challenge and an opportunity: there’s no big European competitor to take on, but many small, local specialist competitors.”
“A multidisciplinary team from Operations, Supply Chain, Business Control, Sales, Product & Supplier Management and Market Intelligence explored and segmented the market. We looked at the value chain, identified key players, geographies, trends, market behaviour and so on.
“Next, we matched what the market looks like with our assortment and capabilities, before starting our market planning.”
“The focus will be a digital-first mindset, applying digital sales techniques and enhancing our digital presence”
- Eddie Perdok
Listen to the podcast where Jelle explains our 3 phased approach to the F&G market.
“We are piloting the project in two countries first, choosing them for their differences in geography and market focus; the Netherlands is landscaping focused, the other, Germany, sees more activity and demand in forestry alongside landscaping. Over the course of 2022, we will then start to scale up across other target countries that share characteristics with these countries. It’s a phased approach, learning as we go, but the focus will be a digital-first mindset, applying digital sales techniques and enhancing our digital presence,” Jelle concludes.
> More about our forest & grass care industry
