Hikvision’s Top North American Exec Discusses China Ties, Market Goals
Jeffrey He explains the Chinese video surveillance leader’s structure and eagerness to deliver value.
He has been in the security industry for the past 25 years.
Could you talk about what are the overall or main goals you’ve set forth for 2016? Where would you like to be when we talk a year from now, and how are you going to get there?
He: The goal is we’ll continue to grow our business, and continue to grow our people. Certainly, we’re working for a company and for our employees. At the same time, we’re working for our families and our children. That’s the goal. At this point, we’re talking about over 200 people on the ground in the United States and Canada. We want to make sure these employees are covered, fully supported and grow with the company. I also believe we should try to provide more value to our dealer and integration partners. I think that if we’re not providing value we should not really exist in the business.
I think we have a very strong corporate structure in the U.S. and Canada. Our Miami logistics center will be fully operational probably this month or next month. We have our Canadian tech support center in Montreal supporting French Canadians and the East Coast of the U.S. and Canada. Those are the indications that we will providing much better support to the dealer partners and integration partners. We’ll continue to grow the business, continue to support our valued partners.
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What about the competition? How do you see the competition in North America and what’s your strategy to out perform them?
He: Competition in the industry really drives technology innovation, growth and improvement, providing stronger values to end users. We need competition in any industry. As a natural result of the commercialization in any industry, the market landscape will move to different forms and shapes over time. Over the course of the next three to five years there will be much more change. In terms of outperforming, it’s difficult to say which one is better. We are aiming at the mass market, so there could be people who outperform us on the high end or really outperform us at the bottom part of the market segment. Each company has their own strengths. They have their set audience in the industry. We’re addressing the mass market, so we hope that we can perform better there with stronger value provided to customers.
Hikvision recently announced an integration with Control4 for smart homes. What does that mean for Hikvision? Is that going to be a big new area for the company?
He: Home automation is a very interesting segment for getting into. H
ome automation is running out of residential operations and commercial, like the intrusion business back 20 years ago. Hikvision cameras are easily integrated with the Control4 smart home operating system, adding to a robust suite of features by which users can control and automate lighting, music, security and energy throughout the home. Also, Hikvision’s API is common to all their products, allowing for great interoperability with third-party devices. We do want to expand our field to service this type of market segment. I’m very glad we have an opportunity to work with Control4.
When Hikvision got started, it was predominantly an OEM business, right?
He: In the early days, probably yes. They are actually doing the compression cards. They sell those cards to other folks who in turn build their own PC business and DVRs. And later on they said the PC-based DVRs will be outdated, so let’s do embedded DVRs. They have this compression technology which has been around for a while embedded in DVRs. That’s how they started. Even with the embedded DVR, there’s a lot of OEM, but they also started with their own branding in China.
I believe that in China today the majority of the business is Hikvision branded. There are a few people OEM-ing from us because they do have loyal customers. They provide their own value to their customers. So we do support them so they can make their own business. In the U.S. and Canada, we started off back in 2007 as an OEM business. In 2010, we started gradually promoting the Hikvision brand. At this point, the OEM and Hikvision brand coexist in America. In Europe, I think the majority is branded business.
Looking at the U.S. market, what would you say is the biggest challenge for Hikvision?
He: I think brand elevation is still a major challenge for us. That has shown in the past few months a lot of the negative campaigns against us, indicating we have a long way to go to elevate our brand equity. That, of course, has been impacted by the national politics. There’s nothing Hikvision can do, we can’t change that. But I believe that as long as we provide value the people eventually will say, “This is good value, and we love it. We love the service and people. We like the products.” So the major challenge is on the brand.
The second one is product localization. So far, we don’t have a U.S. R&D center. Even though we’re in the process of hiring certain people, there’s a longshot to have a full R&D center. Without such localized R&D resources in the U.S. and Canada, it’s very difficult to envision how the culture and operations are impacting the produce design, produce architecture. That’s a tough part as well for us.
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About the Author
Scott Goldfine
Scott Goldfine is the marketing director for Elite Interactive Solutions. He is the former editor-in-chief and associate publisher of Security Sales & Integration. He can be reached at [email protected].
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