Last week our founding director Rob Huberts was interviewed about how RHTC deals with the corona crisis. The article was published on the website of a local newspaper here in the Netherlands. We translated the interview for the non-Dutch visitors of our website. Read more about it below.
Rob, who are you and what do you do? I am Rob Huberts, married to Rietje Manders and we have 4 kids, Inge, Tim, Esther and Roel. We also have one grandson Benjamin and another grandchild on the way. I founded the company RHTC: Rob Huberts Trading Company. My company developed a workshop press that we produce in the Netherlands, but we also work together with a factory in Spain and Poland.We sell these presses, with the support of our dealers, under the brand name Profi Press in 71 countries around the world. Our hydraulic presses are mainly used in car- and truck garages and in maintenance workshops in all sectors / branches.
How does the coronavirus affect your work and private life? When it became clear that the corona crisis was a serious problem, I was still in good spirits. We had performed very well in the first quarter of 2020. We had several nice orders that still needed to be delivered. At first I thought that this crisis was not going to be a big problem for RHTC. Unfortunately I was wrong. Immediately in the first week, customers asked to postpone their deliveries and some even cancelled orders. There was only a little telephone and mail traffic: no trading, no orders. On top of that, because we performed well in January and February, we purchased a lot of hydraulic presses for stock to deliver to our customers as fast as possible. But now that there are few or no orders, we still have them in stock. The suppliers want to be paid, but the customers postpone orders and payments. So, that causes a problem. We work worldwide, so if it does not go well in one continent, there is always a place elsewhere that still sells our machines well. But now everything has come to a standstill. I have never experienced this before. This also has an immediate impact on my private life. We stay at home. My wife, who works at the laboratory in the Radboud Hospital, is only allowed to go there once a week.
How do you deal with that? It made little sense to keep the secretariat in the office. So I asked the employees to work from home, to update the website and design a new pricelist for our biggest October exhibition, which will hopefully still take place. For my job, I have travelled all over the world, all my life. Personal contact with my customer is very important. Now that travelling is impossible, we have conversations with customers via Skype. We have set up a conference room, completely for this purpose with a movable camera, so that I can also zoom in on the catalogue that I have in my hands during the talk. In the future, we will be profiling ourselves in this way much more often and travel less, which will save a lot of time and money. Sitting at home also has its advantages, our potential customers have more have time to surf the internet now and they know where to find us. We received a lot of requests via our website. It remains to be seen whether these requests also become orders, but the first step in the right direction has been taken.
What do you think this crisis brings for the future? At the moment I cannot say anything about this. There is still so much uncertainty. The Technishow that should have taken place in March is planned for September. Will it still take place or not? How many potential customers will it attract? And what will it actually bring us? And what will the economy in the Netherlands and worldwide do? Will companies invest in production machines or more in marketing the goods they produce? Yet another question that concerns us is the quality – price ratio. Our competitors are in Asia (mainly China and Turkey). They supply a less quality product than we do, but their prices are lower. Are customers going to choose price or quality? In any case, we are testing other sales methods. We do not want to work only through dealers but, where possible, also directly (in a digital way). It will provide an extra margin. We will focus on this in the near future. While trading, nothing is ever certain: one day you have nothing and the next day you have everything. At least it was always like that.
And what are you hoping for? Of course I hope that the world economy will recover soon. 90% of our business is export. But we are ready for a new start. We are developing a new catalogue and pricelist, the budgets have been established. I hope RHTC remains healthy so that I can transfer the company to my children Esther and Tim within five years. In any case, we have several large outstanding orders, that will be delivered within the next few weeks. Also, last week we received orders every day of the week, which gives us courage. What I said before: one day you have nothing and the other day you have everything. In private life, I hope that we all stay healthy. We strictly adhere to the RIVM measures. Furthermore, we live as we always do. Fortunately we have a garden and can go outside. However, we have decided not to make large private investments at the moment. Our private lives depend entirely on what the economy will do. If the company is doing well, then so will we. If everything collapses, it will have far-reaching consequences for us. But as long as we can keep it up and the costs don’t rise much further, then I’m a satisfied man