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[Meet the CEO] ‘[People] need to be a little older to start having vision problems [so] the aging population is not a bad thing.’
March 12, 2010
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This is largely due to the nature of its products. A long-standing global player in the optical and optoelectronics industry, Carl Zeiss has manufactured basic industrial products including semiconductors, medical systems, microscopes and industrial gauges. In Korea, consumers might know it as the maker of premium camera and eyeglass lenses. That’s the domain of Carl Zeiss Vision Korea, which has sold eyeglass lenses here since 2005 through around 10,000 opticians across the country.
Q. Please introduce your business in Korea. A. In Korea, we are concentrating on the high end of the market, selling premium quality products that are more expensive than our competitors’. Our market share is somewhere in the 5 percent to 7 percent range, but the potential for growth is huge. Korea is a strategic market because of its aging population. When you have an aging population, we sell more progressive lenses, which are advanced and expensive. Our sales of lenses are growing 15 to 20 percent this year so far [compared with the same period last year], even though the economy is bad. We want to grow further by bringing out a new range of products, new technologies, and new training programs for our opticians. What are those programs? We set up what we call the Carl Zeiss Academy about six months ago. It is a kind of school for opticians that we do business with. [Through the academy,] we help opticians at Zeiss family shops understand products, what they need to do to serve customers better, how to fit lenses, etc. Many Koreans used to wear glasses, but the number seems to be dropping thanks to advances in laser eye surgery. Are those new techniques becoming a threat to your business? No, we don’t see it as going against our business. Contact lenses, which we also sell, are one reason and the limitations of eye surgery are another. Let me explain further. The rate of myopia in Asia is actually increasing. So you have more and more people originally needing either glasses or to be helped in certain way to see better. Contact lenses are mostly a cosmetic thing, but they are very difficult to wear 24 hours a day, so lots of customers wear contacts in the daytime but glasses at home. Eye surgery cannot keep people from needing glasses completely, it just reduces the size of the problem. What Lasik surgery does is to change the cornea, but the lens inside the eyeball cannot be touched. When you get older, the lens inside the eyeball does not move as well as when you were young, so problems happen again. What about the recent demographic changes in Korea like the ageing population and the decreasing birth rate. Are they challenging to your company? Actually because of our market positioning, our main customers are over 45. This is because they need to be a little older to start having visual problems, and our products are little bit more expensive, so they need to have a little bit more money than average customers. So the aging population is not a bad thing. But the fact that the number of children is now falling and the population will probably start decreasing soon - we are already seeing this trend in Japan - that’s not good for business long-term. So how you are going to deal with that? We are trying to widen the product offerings we have, by making better lenses for children and extending the product line for slightly older people. Basically, we try to cover all age categories. Finally, tell us about your business goals. We are targeting, in terms of lens sales, growth of roughly 20 percent. So far we are on track to growth in sales of lenses. We also want to make the Carl Zeiss Academy the best training program on the market, and we have lots of new products to be launched soon. We hope the good products we have on the market are accepted by customers and help them actually lead better lives. By Moon Gwang-lip [joe@joongang.co.kr] |
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