HENRIK SKOV ANDERSEN EPIC CEO INTERVIEW
EPIC CEO INTERVIEW In this interview, Antonio Castelo , PhD, EPIC’s Technology Manager for Bio-Medical and Lasers, talks to Henrik Skov Andersen , CEO at Ibsen Photonics, a Danish manufacturer of transmission diffraction gratings and grating based spectrometer modules for telecom, sensing, lasers and spectroscopy applications. HENRIK SKOV ANDERSEN
What’s the background to your appointment as ceo at ibsen photonics ? In 1989, after doing an MSc in Electrical Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark, I
How has the company developed?
expect from a medium-sized company. It’s very important for us that when a customer joins Ibsen, we do everything we can to be a preferred strategic supplier. To this end, we try to excel at being very open, transparent and collaborative with our customers in identifying their needs. Sometimes this has meant referring a customer to one of our competitors if we think their needs can be better met. The success of this approach can be demonstrated by the fact that over the past 13 years, none of our major customers have left us to go inhouse or to a competitor. We’ve also developed an open company culture and management style where everyone can participate and feel involved in the goals of the company.
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HSA Ibsen was founded in 1991, and was acquired in 2000 by the US company ADC Telecommunications. Following the telecom crash in 2001, Ibsen Photonics was reestablished through a management buy-out with the aim of developing and manufacture high end transmission diffraction gratings and grating based spectrometer modules for a variety of spectroscopy applications. The year before I became CEO in 2011, Ibsen had been acquired by FOSS, a world leader in metrology solutions for food and agriculture. FOSS wanted to implement a new business strategy that focused 100% on OEM customers. Since then, our work force has grown from 25 to 75 at our headquarters in Farum, just north of Copenhagen, and our turnover has increased from €3 million to €20 million in 2023. Nowadays, we sell around 12,000 spectrometers per year and we probably have a worldwide market share of 2-3%. Our main customers are large industrial companies that manufacture measuring instruments in the medical, pharma, chemicals, energy and semiconductor sectors.
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joined McKinsey & Company as a consultant. Two years later, still in my 20s, I was appointed Technical Manager of a 90 strong team at the Timken Company in France, a leader in tapered roller bearings and industrial motion. This was an enormously rewarding and challenging experience as I couldn’t speak French, didn’t know the industry and I didn’t have any leadership experience - but by being humble and listening to people I survived. Over the next 20 years, I held senior leadership positions at numerous international Danish companies, including Scandinavian Mobility (mobility aids), Prey4 (incubation services for startups), Coloplast (medical equipment manufacturing), and Netgroup (enterprise hosting and cloud services). Then in 2011, as Ibsen Photonics’ CEO was stepping down, I was recruited as the company’s new CEO.
Do you have any plans to incorporate integrated photonics and digitization in
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your products?
We definitely see photonics as a growing business, and if we identify good startup companies
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in the integrated phonics field, we could potentially acquire them down the road. For this reason, we like to participate in EU projects to link up with some of the companies that are at the forefront of PIC technology. Having said this, it needs to be stressed that our innovation is really driven not by basic research but by innovation to help customers find solutions which they can implement tomorrow rather than in five or 10 years’ time. Regarding digitization, our parent company FOSS are very strong in supporting their customers digitally. We provide electronically interfaced components, which from the start are
What were your initial challenges?
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When I joined the company, it was a whole new world as I knew virtually nothing about the
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What are the main factors of your success?
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technology. But from my previous experience I’d learned that most good business decisions are based on common sense and should be able to be explained in a way that every single employee understands. Fortunately, there was a great team in place and by being humble and listening to people, we worked closely together to find the right solutions.
Part of the success is that we’ve managed to remain focused on our core OEM strategy, i.e.,
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building strong quality systems, strong customer interaction, quarterly business reviews, and strong reporting - a lot of the things which large Industrial companies want but don’t normally
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