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Listen to a full interview with Arthur Leaker on a special episode of The kbbreview Podcast. Listen NOW using the player below or go straight to this episode in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Youtube. Alternatively, simple search ‘kbbreview’ wherever you get your podcasts.

Hisense is now a familiar name across the UK, but our appliance business here is actually still relatively young. 

We started the UK business in 2012 and I was one of the founding management team. Initially we focused on refrigeration, and people are often surprised to hear that we didn’t really start selling TVs until several years later. The acquisition of Gorenje in 2018 transformed our position in Europe and allowed us to become a full-line supplier, adding cooking, dishwashing and expanding our laundry range.

Our real breakthrough, though, came in refrigeration. We initially expected conventional fridge freezers to be our core business, but we quickly discovered that consumers were far more excited by our multi-door products. That gave us the confidence to work with our R&D teams in China to develop the category further. 

Through innovation and product design, we effectively created our own space in the market, and we’re still one of the dominant players in multi-door refrigeration today.

Uncertainty is definitely the biggest issue in the market right now. If you listen to economists and politicians, everyone’s trying to work out where the market is heading. House prices, consumer confidence, travel habits – they all seem to change from one week to the next. As manufacturers, nobody has all the answers, so you have to understand your own strengths. 

Consumers are balancing different priorities today. During Covid they invested heavily in their homes. Now they’re trying to balance home improvements with holidays and other experiences. Understanding those changing behaviours is almost as important as understanding the appliance market itself. You have to become a little bit of a sociologist as well as a brand manager.

Steady growth

Hisense entered the UK not long after the financial crash, and that meant we had to work hard to establish ourselves at a time when most retailers weren’t necessarily looking for new suppliers.

But we simply had to trust our instincts! There was understandable scepticism about another new brand entering a very competitive market, so we listened very carefully to what retailers and consumers were telling us and let that lead the way. 

Rather than following the traditional route, we embraced online retail much earlier than many expected. That gave us the opportunity to present our entire product range, tell the product story properly and, importantly, learn directly from customer feedback.

It also allowed us to build the business steadily over time. We didn’t chase volume, we didn’t flood the market with stock and we didn’t create problems for ourselves through discounting. Every stage of growth allowed us to test our logistics, our service operation and our supply chain before taking the next step. Looking back, that foundation gave us the confidence to move into more traditional retail channels later.

Supply chain resilience is another issue that has become much more prominent in recent years.Our model has always been based on selling products before bringing significant volumes into the country. 

We wanted to know where at least half of the stock was going before we ordered it. That approach gave us confidence in our forecasting and avoided the need for aggressive discounting later.

For us, credibility and integrity have always been critical. Retailers need to believe that you understand your business and that you’re making sensible decisions. As we’ve grown, we’ve continued to invest in forecasting, planning and supply chain management, but we’ve never lost sight of those original principles.

People sometimes assume it’s the advertising that has built the Hisense brand, whether that’s football sponsorship or television campaigns. Those things certainly help with building awareness, but awareness only matters if it’s for the right reasons. We’ve taken the same approach across categories like cooking, laundry and dishwashing. 

Behind the scenes we’ve spent years refining those products, and when people see the range today, they often don’t realise just how much development has gone into getting to this point!

Listen to a full interview with Arthur Leaker on a special episode of The kbbreview Podcast. Listen NOW using the player below or go straight to this episode in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Youtube. Alternatively, simple search ‘kbbreview’ wherever you get your podcasts.