Development into a video brand

Development into a video brand posted: 13/01/2023

by Uwe Agnes

Rik Hoer e

In December 2021 Rik Hoer e was appointed CEO of the Riedel Product Division. In the interview, we looked back together on the first year in his new position and found out in which direction he believes the company should develop.

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Rik, you are about one year in your new position as the CEO of the Riedel Product Division. Looking back, what would be in your view the most important events and developments in your area of responsibility during that time?

The most important event was definitely the supply chain disruption, which was not exactly what we were looking forward to. But that obviously was a very, very big challenge to handle from day one. Luckily, this problem is a bit like in Formula One: if it rains on the race track, it rains for every driver! That was exactly the case for the supply chain problem here. All our competitors had exactly the same problems.

The very good thing is that we were able to manage our way through this challenge and still overachieved our projected targets for this year. There are huge increases in the cost of goods, because of brokers in the middle, which drive prices up to absolutely crazy levels. For example an item which usually costs one US-Dollar dollar a piece is now sold for 250 US-Dollars. That s literally what happens. And then you have the choice to either stop supplying and let down your customers or you continue to supply your customers and take the hit, because you cannot charge the total increase in cost to your customers. So, we decided very early to share the pain and carefully managed expenses, and still ended the year with a significant overachievement in revenue while being able to ship everything our customers wanted.

What was, besides the supply chain issues, your main agenda as the new CEO of the Product Division?

I started this new position with some context, because I have known Riedel for quite some time. In my previous company, I was the Riedel distributor for a few regions in Europe since 2003 and joined Riedel 10 years ago and have worked in several roles since then. So there has been a long relationship with Riedel.

Nevertheless the first thing I did was listening to a number of people, leaders in the company as well as people on the shop floor. Which issues would they like me to work on and what would they want to see handled differently moving forward? You try to get an understanding of the status quo and continue to work from there.

We are in the middle of big changes. There is a lot of disruption in the industry, from the way viewers consume content up to the war on talent and the supply chain disruption, with vendors either experiencing big problems or disappearing altogether.

But also also there is a change in technology, for which we need to prepare our customers. What does that mean in particular for Riedel? Riedel used to be a hardware-centric company, and is evolving into a much more software-centric company, both on COTS as well as cloud-native, still with a decent amount of own hardware in the future. This change is not just a technology change, but also requires the organization and our customer centric end-to-end processes to change. The change process is embedded in a digital transformation project, which is led by the group CFO, Frank Eischet and myself.

Personally I'm someone who loves change but change may also create uncertainty. It's one of my main targets as Product Division CEO to implement those changes, with respect for each and everyone in the company who has contributed to the success of today. That needs to be honored and continued to be built on for the future. Its a bit like with the US Marines: we leave no one behind. That's my main set of targets.

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How would you describe the situation of the Riedel Group at the moment?

I would describe our situation as amazingly good! After the Covid 2020 year, we have had two very strong years. Obviously the market is picking up, some of that will be down to investments being done now that had been delayed previously. For 2023 the order backlog and pipeline are very strong

Riedel has still a lot of growth potential worldwide. First of all, from a geographical or lateral point of view, there are regions in which we are not yet present to the right extent and where we don't have a large team yet. But also then from a vertical point of view, we we are growing our video business worldwide. This has significantly increased over the over the past years already and we are taking further steps, one of those being the acquisition of two new companies in order to to further fuel our software strategy on one hand while also investing in a broader video product portfolio.

You are referring to the acquisition of SDNsquare and SimplyLive which both happened last September. Could you expand on what you hope each company to contribute to your strategy?

Lets start with SDNsquare, a technology start-up based on university campus in Gent, Belgium, which started as a spin-off and developed a lot of know-how about SDN orchestration. With broadcast production going increasingly IP, the orchestration of these IP networks is a core ingredient and it was thus also an important building block identified in our product strategy.

When the opportunity came up to acquire a core competence center which had experience and had provided already the biggest productions worldwide with their technology, we acquired the technology and the core people in that team.

The focus of the team is now to take that product from where it is today, enrich it to where it is needed for the future and integrate it into our ecosystem.

With SimplyLive we had a very different reason for our acquisition. Like I said, we intend to grow our portfolio of video products a

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