LG Eyes Commercial Cooling

H Y Nho, President, Air Conditioning Division of LG Electronics Ltd, recently visited Oman to congratulate Oman Gulf Enterprises LLC, part of the OTE Group, for its steady and excellent performance during 2007. Here, he speaks about the LG Group, its activities in the GCC countries and its future plans.

What is your assessment of Oman’s air-conditioning market?
Oman’s air-conditioning market is changing. Our residential air conditioners have registered excellent growth. Out of every three air conditioners sold, one is LG. Oman market will grow further. This year our growth is over 30 per cent more than last year.

What are your future plans?
We are focusing on commercial air conditioners. We are officially launching these in December in Dubai. The advantage of commercial air conditioners is that these have a high energy saving capacity, improved indoor air quality and are also easy to install and use.

Our focus on Oman is on the Art Pool air conditioners and Multi Power Systems (MPS). MPS is good for high energy saving and air quality. It also saves space for buildings. We also intend to introduce Multi–V, meaning one outdoor and 12 indoors. Tourism has great potential in Oman and there are plenty of world-class hotels coming up. We are targeting the hotel industry where we can supply Multi-V systems.

We are number one in the global market for eight consecutive years now, and are also the market leader in the residential air conditioners segment in Oman. With the Oman Government focusing on promoting tourism in a big way, we expect to grow by 63 per cent. We grew by 30 per cent this year, in spite of being the market leader. However, we have achieved an overall growth of 63 per cent that includes the residential as well as commercial air conditioners. The commercial air conditioners are growing multifold and it will continue to grow that way for us in the future.

Tell us about your proposed training academy?
We decided to establish a mini training academy in Oman before the end of next year. We are considering Oman as a very important market. Oman has arrived and has reached the critical mass. Therefore we need to have our own training facilities, rather than sending people to Dubai. Sending the workforce to Dubai is an expensive proposition and it is not as efficient as having our own facility here in Oman.

Have you bagged any orders from multi-billion prestigious projects in Oman?
We have supplied huge quantity of air conditioners to the Blue City project, which has just started. We have also bagged quite a lot of prestigious projects, which is why it has even become more important for us to upgrade our service centre and to train our own people. The academy is going to help us in training our own people as well as outside contractors, architects, engineers and others.

Can you talk about your global production capacity?
We manufacture 12 million air conditioners. Our capacity is 15 million air conditioners globally and we have plants in eight countries. We manufacture key compressors such as rotary compressors, inverter compressors, etc., in-house. We also manufacture high tech heat compressors in-house to improve performance of heating and cooling cycles. We also manufacture inverted controllers, which are highly sophisticated.

The in-house manufacturing proves advantageous for LG products. They are not only innovative but also affordable because you are not sourcing the components from outside. We have to make sure that the quality is maintained. So when we make the products in-house we are sure that the quality is the best, not the case when we buy components from outside. The US is our largest market for window air conditioners. The European market is the second major destination where we sell split air conditioners.

– Jayashankar Menon

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