Royal Ahrend, the leading Dutch designer and manufacturer of sustainable and healthy working environments, is reinforcing its position in China by opening a Flagship Showroom in the Shanghai city centre. Through its annual growth of 25%, China makes a vital contribution to the international growth of Royal Ahrend as a whole. Starting next year, the company’s network of dealers in Asia will undergo phased expansion to India, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines. In its Ahrend and Gispen brands, Royal Ahrend possesses two lines of ‘Dutch Design’ office furnishing with proven international appeal.
Growing dealer network and dedicated factory in China
The Shanghai Flagship Showroom will allow Ahrend to serve their international clients even more effectively by featuring the latest developments with regard to office design. Today, the dealer network in China consists of over 40 locations.
Royal Ahrend is the only European purveyor of office furnishings to have its own factory in China. This production location in Taicang, which employs 130 people, focuses exclusively on delivering high-quality products with a European look and feel to customers across Asia and the Middle East, with an extremely quick delivery time. Royal Ahrend also operates other production locations in the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, which will continue to serve the remaining sales territories around the globe.
Eugène Sterken, CEO of Royal Ahrend: “China is a major sales market for us, as Western and Chinese multinationals are still taking major steps to expand their network of offices in this country. The rate of growth in the number of offices and upgrades to existing branches is quite high, increasingly so among larger Chinese companies. Our volume here has seen 25% annual growth for several years now. We are benefiting from our long track record in large and complex interior projects on behalf of multinationals, wherever in the world they happen to be. In coming years, we intend to considerably strengthen our position in China and other parts of Asia and the Middle East, in order to continue meeting the increasingly international demand for high-quality office furnishings.”
International coverage
Royal Ahrend is responding to the growing trend of multinationals around the world desiring effective working environments that meet the highest standards and which are also aligned to a uniform corporate identity. their growing dealer network and the dedicated factory additionally enables them to meet all local standards, certification criteria and requirements in Asia and the Middle East. Royal Ahrend implements international projects in a great many countries on behalf of clients including MSD, Deloitte, ExxonMobile, GlaxoSmithKline, HSBC, ING, Lenovo, Johnson & Johnson, Philips, Shell, Unilever and Vanderlande.
The look and feel of an office is a vital component of corporate identity
The most successful companies in the world are attaching ever-greater importance to the design of their offices and working spaces. Such spaces are becoming an increasingly vital component of the identity and attractiveness of a given employer; they play a crucial role in the company’s performance and the well-being of its employees. In addition, organisations are changing at an accelerating pace. Customers increasingly demand flexible and project-based working environments, and more and more often they are furnishing these according to the principles of Activity-based Working. The principle here is that the activity to be done should determine the design of the working space. Companies who adopt this principle have a markedly lower rate of employee turnover and absenteeism due to illness, as well as greater productivity and well-being among employees.