Immediately see increase in need for hygiene across businesses
Headquartered in Finland, Helsinki, Lindström Group is a textile rental service company in Europe and Asia. It offers solutions for the cleanliness and interior design of facilities, corporate clothing and protection. In an interview with Fibre2fashion, Anupam Chakrabarty, SVP – Lindstrom, Finland, speaks about the market dynamics of rental services worldwide along with the opportunities the coronavirus pandemic has brought to the industry.
What is the size of the textile rental services industry worldwide? At what rate is it growing?
Well, there are no scientific study of the exact size of the textile rental services industry. However, it is good to note that the potential for textile rental services are extremely large with every industry having the need of textiles, whether as uniforms, or flat linen, or simple things as textile mats of the floor. The penetration of rental services, however, differ between countries with the penetration in developed markets being much higher than countries like China and India, where the services have started developing over the last decade only. And therefore the growth rate also differs between countries, with countries where the services have been recently introduced like Asia, the growth rates are in the range of 20 to 30 per cent compared to developed economies where the growth rates vary between 2 to 5 per cent.
Please elaborate on your network of international marketing channels and strategic alliances with regional agencies and internationally well-known brands.
As on date, most of our operations are managed in-house and we provide a comprehensinve 360 degree service directly to all our customers. Our current strategic partners are mainly in the supply chain side or in the delivery services side. Having said that, in our latest Strategy and Vision 2025, we are open to creating or being part of ecosystems offering products and services that are in line with our long term business values and strategy.
What are the latest innovations and technologies Lindstrom is working on?
Like every other industry, textile service industry is also always innovating on various topics in order to add more value to our customers. We at Lindstrom, consider ourselves as a forerunner in digitalising our services to bring in more added value to our customers. With the help of our digitalised services, customers can expect to bring in much higher levels of transparency, operational efficiency and thereby, economic efficiencies.
How does your supply chain network work? What regions of the world is part of your supply chain?
Well, for Lindstrom which is operating in 24 countries today spanning Europe and Asia, with a large amount of textile procurement annually, it is quite important to have a very effective supply chain network. Currently, bulk of our procurements are done from Asia and Africa as well as some European countries.
How agile is your supply chain? What steps do you take to ensure transparency at every stage?
Our supply chain is an essential part of the seamless service that we provide to our customers and that includes different parts – our fabric and garment suppliers, our central warehouses where finished stocks are maintained for our end customers, our stock points in our business units as well as our own ‘Production on Demand’ manufacturing units called Prodem. Having these different elements in our supply chain enables us to be agile enough to meet the customers’ expectations at all times.
Which consumer trend is going to drive the way you do business in the next 2-3 years?
With the current outbreak of Coronavirus pandemic which has impacted the world at large, we would immediately see an increase in the need for hygiene across all businesses. Creating a safe and hygienic workplace for all employees to work safely without the thought of contamination will surely drive the consumer trend during the coming years. Lindstrom has a long history in being able to provide the best of hygienic solutions to our customers and we expect to continue to do so, including introducing our services to new industry segments which have not had these needs so far. Additionally, with ‘sustainability’ being a key driving factor in the decision making process of individuals as well corporates today, many of our new service offering like Reusable Shopping Bags or Resuable Face Mask Services are also new offerings that we believe will drive business in the near future.
What are the long-term and short-term sustainability goals at Lindstrom?
Sustainability has been a cornerstone of our business operations for many years now and Lindstrom has been publishing a Sustainability Report every year. Our Sustainability Report for 2019 has just been published and you can download the same from our website.
Additionally, for our new Strategy Period, we have set ourselves some very ambitious goals for the next 5 years with regards to Sustainability. Our goals are mainly focused on 2 strong components – How do we make our end customers’ operations more sustainable and How do we ensure that we recycle 100 per cent of our textiles by 2025. In addition to this, many of the sevice offerings we have just launched recently, including in India, like the Reusable Shopping bags help indivduals also play a role in environmental sustainability.
Which business sectors do you cater to? How do the solutions differ across the sectors?
Globally, we are catering to many many different business sectors including Food and Food Processing, Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, Automobiles, Engineering, Facility Management, Retail, Electronics, Hotels and Restaurants, to name a few. To these different segments we service them with our workwear services, mat services, hotel textile services, washroom services, industrial wiper services, cleanroom services and restaurant textile services. Different industries use different service portfolios but even within one portfolio like workwear services, the needs could be very different for different industry segments like hygiene requirement could be the key in Food Industry, whereas in Metals and Mining it could be the safety needs and in Retail the need for brand image in addition to hygiene.
What is the annual production capacity of the various products you supply? Will you be expanding the capacities in the future?
With an agile supply chain in place, we are able to ensure that production capacity is not a constraint for any of the products in our service concept. With regards to the servicing capacity, we work in a very modular concept and are able to expand the capacity requirement in any unit in any country in a very short span of time to meet our customers’ expectations. This is an ongoing exercise and we are constantly increasing our capacities across all markets.
What new opportunities will the COVID-19 outbreak bring to your industry?
As mentioned earlier, Lindstroms’ services support improved hygiene practices across industries and across all countries, even in the times of the pandemic. The local governments have allowed us to continue with our services to support essential businesses like Healthcare, Food and Pharma companies; to operate and support them with our workwear services which are key to improved hygiene practices. Additionally, like I mentioned, we have also launched services like Reusable Face Mask Services which is also a key need during these times.
Will you ever get into PPE?
At this moment, we are not offering PPEs other than our standard workwear offering and face masks as a part of our service.
Which are your major international markets? Apart from that, are you planning to expand to any other regions in the near future?
With a history of 170+ years in Finland, it is one of our biggest markets and contributes to about half of the group turnover. Additionally, we currently operate in 23 other countries in Europe and Asia with China, India, Russia and UK being some of the countries with the fastest growth.
What are your growth expectations from the company for the next two fiscals?
At the beginning of the year, when we started our 5 year Strategy Period, one of our financial goals have been to be grow at the speed of about 8 per cent YOY at the Group Level. However, with the sudden change in the business environment due to the Corona pandemic, Lindstrom like all other business houses, is constantly monitoring the changed business environment and its impact in the overall numbers. But in the long run, we remain committed to our strategic goals of 8 per cent growth YOY. (PC)
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