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| Industrial Components: examples
of Danish niche products |
| Courtesy Danfoss |
Denmark, with half the population of New York City,
doesn’t try to make huge things. Danes have
been content to work in smaller areas, swim in smaller
ponds. They leave automobile manufacturing for others,
but they’re great on bikes. They find little
things that the world needs and then turn their
near-matchless workforce and work ethic loose inventing
and developing them.
“We’re just a small Danish niche business,”
says Peter Kurstein of Radiometer, which is a phrase
heard over and over. “Small” companies
in Denmark can easily clear hundreds of millions
of dollars a year and employ thousands of people.
The reluctance to overextend oneself isn’t
humility -- it’s more like hardheaded realism
and business sense. It has worked for Denmark. They
feel that titanic struggles are best carried out
in the middle of a large ocean.
Denmark has scored within widely diverse areas
-- food processing, precision engineering components,
meters and turbines. The following pages spotlight
several Danish firms that have followed this philosophy
about as far as it can be taken. All are prosperous,
growing, and, by Danish standards, deal in megabucks.
Most are fed by even smaller companies, tiny startups,
inventors laboring in their garage, working toward
a good idea and process that one of the “big”
guys might buy. They know they won’t be cheated.
These firms started the same way. In the words of
Ferring’s executive chairman, Fredierik Paulsen,
“My father started this company in his basement,
which is the way one should start a company.”
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