How has IPC been growing in the last couple of years?
During the economic downturn of the past few years, IPC has been committed to strengthen its competitiveness through a number of initiatives aimed at improving efficiency and cost structure. Parallely, a special focus has been put on ensuring growth conditions, both by developing new innovative products and expanding our operations in the emerging markets such as Far East, India and Brazil.
We are pleased with the strong performance of 2010 that recorded a double-digit sales growth in professional cleaning market. The positive results demonstrate that our strategies were effective and they encourage us to stay on course.
What are your plans for India?
India represents for IPC a tremendous opportunity and in view of the future growth expectations, we have planned to build a strong position in this country.
In New Delhi, we already have an IPC branch with a skilled management we fully trust. We are in the process of developing an aggressive strategy to exploit the huge potential of this strategic market. We want to reinforce the organization by appointing sales representatives throughout the country and also by shifting
the current office to a more spacious facility and showroom in order to provide our customers with a high level of service. In the past, we started our business in India with floor products, now we want to gradually expand all IPC portfolios.
Are you adding new businesses to IPC?
The IPC integrated system includes many companies, each focusing on a specific product category. From this point of view, I think each company has its own new ideas, yet they work in unison with the same vision in order to provide the customer with the best solution. The development of solutions is aimed at various sectors and user segments based on the awareness of the customer needs. The products are derived from collaboration between group companies and also between them and external companies. In that way we are different from other companies. For example, if you take ECS (Eco Cleaning System), it is a special machine which utilises the competencies of IPC Gansow and of IPC Ready System. It uses the specific microfibre for the brushes.
Another example of our commitment is GreenTube, the winner of the Pulire innovation award. This is a system to produce pure water for cleaning, designed and made with the effort of a number of professional operators. GreenTube is a ground breaking innovation which opens up pure water technology to new markets and new cleaning applications, especially window cleaning.
IPC’s HighRise, which was showcased in Amsterdam last year, is a vertical surface cleaning machine for skyscrapers. HighRise cleans glass facades of any heights rapidly and safely. It is a cleaning robot controlled remotely from the ground and uses only purified water as cleaning agents. The system is fully automated and self moving that does away with the hazards of high-rise window cleaning. In terms of efficiency, this machine has the possibility to clean a building in two days instead of two to three weeks which a manual cleaning process would take. We have done a global analysis and found that there is a huge market for this system. In India too there is a great potential.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………..
IPC GreenTube – Pure Water Cleaning System
GreenTube is a compact, light and practical system. The innovative aspects are:
-Simplification of the machine’s concept and structure;
- dimensions: (LxWxH) 33x28x145cm
- weight: 12,7 kg
– Reduction of components and connections, elimination of hoses;
– Positioning of functional components inside a single load-bearing cylinder which contains a full four purification stages:
- Sediment filter
- Active carbon filter
- Reverse osmosis membrane
- Deionising resin cartridge
The advantages of GreenTube are based on five key elements:
The possibility of cleaning various types of surface (glazing, solar panels, boats, interior and exterior surfaces, etc.) even at great heights with the help of accessories like telescopic poles for photovoltaic panels;
Perfect cleaning because of 100% pure water; reduction in operating costs: limited cost of equipment,
High productivity for the operator and lower running costs (€ per litre of water produced);
Equipment extremely practical and simple to use;
Positive environmental impact, due to the reduction in components and elimination of chemical cleaning products.
