While Hexagon had no previous business in the field, the firm offered a possible path toward leadership in a fragmented market being reshaped by innovation in fields like lasers. measurement technology firm Brown & Sharpe, which had once sought to recruit him - an offer he turned down. PATH TO LEADERSHIPįocusing the business on telecommunications gear or vehicle components were among the options he was considering when he recalled U.S. “We set up a number of criteria - that we would be world leading, that we would have large R&D content and little invested fixed assets - it should be easy to move the operations if there were shocks in the global economy,” he said. Rollen had to think of ways to realign a company so diverse it came as a surprise when he found it ran day-care centres. Build what you want,” Rollen, now a trim and youthful 47, told Reuters from the company’s Stockholm office of Scandinavian wood design, with large windows overlooking the capital. Rollen, who first made a name for himself as a young CEO of metals firm Kanthal, had attracted his attention. Schorling had bought a controlling stake in the company the year before, aiming to build something from the ground up. When Ola Rollen stepped through the doors at Hexagon as CEO in 2000, leaving a job as head of a division at engineer Sandvik SAND.ST, he entered a company with lots of businesses but no business idea and scarcely any growth prospects.įounded in 1975, Hexagon was then a sprawling conglomerate with its fingers in everything from tuna fish imports to vehicle hydraulics and, as financier Melker Schorling told Rollen at a meeting in downtown Stockholm in 1999, it was basically garbage. The company, market leader in precision measurement technology used in fields from microchip making to surveying dam construction, is now worth more than Swedish world number two white goods maker Electrolux ELUXb.ST after taking its business so far from its roots as to be unrecognisable. STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - In the shadow of well-known brands like Volvo and Ericsson, an acquisition-packed decade has made technology firm Hexagon HEXAb.ST one of Sweden's most valuable companies and a rare newcomer among its top blue chips.
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