In preparation for releasing a new range of integrated cooking appliances, ASKO managing director Crt Prasnikar has undertaken an organisational restructure, switching from a network of state managers to a category manager system.
Prasnikar arrived in Australia at the end of September 2012 to replace retiring ASKO MD Richard Sim. In his final years running the Australian subsidiary of the Slovenian-owned originally Swedish brand, Sim implemented a pro forma, or agency, business model, similar to that pioneered by Miele.
A Slovenian native with experience working in the Scandinavian market, Prasnikar said he will be retaining and investing in this model, which for him is a new way of doing business.
“In Europe, only Miele is trying an agency model some countries, but in general it is not the practice, so if you don’t work for Miele you are not familiar with it,” he said.
“It’s an interesting and different mentality behind how we do business, since all of a sudden you are a retailer, or closer to the retailer than we were before, so basically we have to adjust our organisation so we are more flexible in terms how we deal with the market.”
A key part of this adjustment is the switch from state managers throughout the country to category managers that will now be given greater power to deal with ASKO’s retail partners.
“Before we had state managers — each state had their own ‘head of the state’ — and now we are going to a more leaner organisation where we will have category managers for each product category we have, responsible for the whole country, and not per state,” he said. “It’s just a functional change — it’s not influencing anything dramatically —it is just the way we approach the retailers, to be closer to them.”
Prasnikar said that “from the head count perspective, [ASKO] will be approximately on the same level”. Appliance Retailer understands that four ASKO state managers have recently or will soon be leaving the company.
In the New Year, Prasnikar has indicated that ASKO will embark on a product category expansion, focused on penetrating the integrated cooking appliance segment. In this space, ASKO’s nominal rivals would be Miele, Smeg, Siemens and Electrolux.
“This year was quite a good year,” he said. “Next year we are especially looking forward to enlarging our product portfolio and stepping into a new segment that ASKO was not present in before: Cooking.
“We will bring some innovative products that might make a difference for the ASKO brand.”
Appliance Retailer has been told by retailers that ASKO has had a particularly good 2012, with the new agency model doing its job to maintain prices without detrimentally affecting sales volume.