Carlsberg and KHS in Asia have been working together in partnership for a long time. Looking back on the two companies’ close and extremely productive cooperation, global key account manager Norman Gras says, “Over the past ten years, we’ve successfully managed lots of projects together, especially in China.”
Most recently in 2021, KHS realized two canning lines with a respective output of up to 90,000 containers per hour in Dali (Yunnan Province) and in Yibin (Sichuan Province). The lines were installed and commissioned under the difficult conditions then imposed by the coronavirus pandemic. Gras is thus all the prouder of the fact that the work on this project produced a very good result. “On acceptance, we had a line efficiency of 99% and 100% – even before the agreed deadline,” Gras adds.Â
One team instead of customer and supplier
Paul Kime, senior assets, projects and utilities director at Carlsberg Asia, describes the company’s recipe for success as follows, “Norman and I have worked closely together for years. The same applies to the many employees who implement our projects. This naturally builds up trust. Through our many joint projects, we’ve always been able to significantly improve the way we work and better the processes on both sides. We all see ourselves as a team with a common goal rather than two separate companies engaged in a traditional customer/supplier relationship.”
The latest joint undertaking is also one of the biggest to date in the South Chinese metropolis of Foshan, since 2022, Carlsberg has been working on a greenfield project with an output of five million hectoliters that’s to be expanded to a capacity of 14 million hectoliters in three construction stages. New buildings with a total area of about 80,000 square meters have been erected on a plot measuring 16 hectares. At this first phase, the group has invested €191 million to date in what’s now its 27th brewery in the People’s Republic.Â
