Hasselblad has gone to china

[Alan Edward Klein]

I've been using Google Gemini AI to get service and maintenance directions for all sorts of issues at home. AI is very helpful in learning how to operate, clean, maintain and repair home appliances, cameras, my car, etc. It often supplies links to the manuals it used to summarize the repair.

 

[Dan Daniel]

Bears no relation to the topic. The Chinese bought the company, they're running it as they please. Likely with a far lower "MBA-density" than most Western corporations.

Yes, it does bear relationship. Eliminating customer service is an integral part of cost-cutting, which is an integral part of 'MBA' mindthink, whether in Sweden or China. Maybe I should have used Doctorow's 'enshittifcation,' or 'neoliberalism.' Hopefully as a moderator you will let this comment stand, or you can remove your response to my comment.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Im sorry to write this but im so frustrated, so lets get some steam out.

I got 2 Hasselblad scanners, and some older cameras. I live 20 min away from the head office of Hasselblad in Sweden. Formally I have always been able to drop of my scanners to service. Talk to the technician, or sellers and they have been extremely nice, and easy to reach. It was one of my favorite companies for many years.

Unfortunately, now when I try to do the same, I realized that it's not the same company anymore. There is one number, and it's connected to a call center in China. They refuse to give out the number to anyone in Sweden, and absolutely not to a technician. This results in lots of emails, and hard to understand phone conversations where I try to explain the particular problem with this scanner, and how to find the fault (only on 4x5" scans). All I get back is automatic mails with a quote for standard service. I then call to china again to try to figure out if anyone has solved the problem I had. But they can only forward this to the service technicians... This is so stupid. I really get frustrating. Something that was personal, and went fast is now a multi day project and talking to the Chinese (nothing agains Chinese people) is like talkting to a very polite wall.

I would never buy any gear from a company like this. Totally worthless costumer service! It's really the opposite of what the company used to represent.

Have you used their web page for assistance? It provides service locations, manuals, software, etc.

Start here:

SCANNER

www.hasselblad.com

 

[koraks]

Yes, it does bear relationship. Eliminating customer service is an integral part of cost-cutting, which is an integral part of 'MBA' mindthink, whether in Sweden or China. Maybe I should have used Doctorow's 'enshittifcation,' or 'neoliberalism.' Hopefully as a moderator you will let this comment stand, or you can remove your response to my comment.

L'enfer, c'est les autres.

I think I should put that in my sig one day. Seems like a disease of the times. Far more problematic than proliferation of certain titles.

 

[BrianShaw]

Yes, it does bear relationship.

There's an old (and offensive) joke, "How many engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?" It probably takes fewer MBAs to ruin a business than that... no matter what the answer may be. That said, of course, it depends on the metric being applied to measure the business "improvements".

 

[koraks]

Say what you want, at least the MBA's tend to refrain from making lame jokes about engineers. Even though the opportunities for doing so are tremendously rich indeed.

For the record, I'm neither an engineer, nor do I hold an MBA title. I'm a surprised (appalled) stander-by watching the apparently deeply rooted contempt of people for others they apparently do not (want to) understand. It's one of humanities no so pretty faces.

 

[BrianShaw]

the apparently deeply rooted contempt of people for others

In many cases it's no more and no less than different experience with various types of people. Experience tends to be the foundation of understanding, for better or worse. But I completely agree... it's not always pretty.

 

[chuckroast]

Yes, it does bear relationship. Eliminating customer service is an integral part of cost-cutting, which is an integral part of 'MBA' mindthink, whether in Sweden or China. Maybe I should have used Doctorow's 'enshittifcation,' or 'neoliberalism.' Hopefully as a moderator you will let this comment stand, or you can remove your response to my comment.

So rather than cutting costs, you'd prefer they just go out of business?

Hasselblad - for whatever reason - tried to live on their legacy products, missed the digital revolution until way too late, didn't control their manufacturing costs, and got gutted by a new reality. All commerce is a tradeoff between good, fast, and cheap and that gets much harder when your brand is becoming irrelevant. Their customer base was always primarily working pros, and those pros couldn't run to digital capture fast enough. It also didn't help that the EU regulations tend to add a lot of friction to business activity thereby putting downward pressure on profitability.

So yeah, they got bought and the new entity has to control costs to survive. It's just how reality operates ... and I say this as someone that has used Hasselblad V since the 1970s and owned and used my own since the 1980s and someone who very much misses the old 'Blad.

Late stage businesses that have passed their zenith of profitability are often faced with a set of bad choices. Pretending this is an "MBA" problem is reductive and simplistic.

It is worth noting that these new owners and their evvvvvviiiiil MBAs have managed to keep Hasselblad profitable, albeit at a relatively small level by comparison to their industry peers. I don't have the numbers right at hand, but even Leica - another elite Veblen brand - is about 4x the size of Hasselblad. Something like $650M USD vs Hasselblad's $150M-ish USD. I guess those MBAs deciding to sell watches and teddy bears were on to something.

P.S. I'm not an MBA but I've worked with many. They do a whole bunch more than just financial analysis, or at least the good ones do.

 

[Chan Tran]

But Hasselblad is doing better today than all the time when they were selling the H series.

 

[Kino]

We can at least take comfort in the fact that there is a growing film photography interest in China evidenced by such companies as ETone and Lucky film (to name only a couple), as well increased participation on Photrio by Chinese citizens.

Increasingly rare, vintage items are being manufactured new and I find most of them to be of good quality when the only other option is basically find it used and battered after a prolonged search.

I feel we are fortunate that the entire Film scene did not completely collapse in the late 1990's and leave us with nothing but freezer burned film and junk store cameras.

 

[warden]

Yes, it does bear relationship. Eliminating customer service is an integral part of cost-cutting, which is an integral part of 'MBA' mindthink, whether in Sweden or China. Maybe I should have used Doctorow's 'enshittifcation,' or 'neoliberalism.' Hopefully as a moderator you will let this comment stand, or you can remove your response to my comment.

The past two CEOs of Hasselblad (since 2009) had terminal degrees in medicine, science, and math, not MBAs. FWIW.

 

[djdister]

We can at least take comfort in the fact that there is a growing film photography interest in China evidenced by such companies as ETone and Lucky film (to name only a couple), as well increased participation on Photrio by Chinese citizens.

You forgot to mention large format camera manufacturers Chamonix and Shen Hao...

 

[4season]

Hasselblad - for whatever reason - tried to live on their legacy products, missed the digital revolution until way too late

And around the same time, they spent a ton of money on a brand new building, which apparently never worked well as a camera factory, and which wasn't popular with staff.

 

[chuckroast]

But Hasselblad is doing better today than all the time when they were selling the H series.

But both of those pale to what they were selling when the 500 cameras were their bread and butter (I suspect, but do not know this for certain).

 

[DREW WILEY]

Cutting costs in customer service is false economy. Yes, the number of corporations which put their best foot forward in this respect are relatively rare these days, but it does make a big difference, even to their own success. It can be money far better spent than on hiring more MBA's. I've had decades of frustration with those - called 'em "marketing monkeys", who didn't even know how to use a monkey wrench themselves. Fortunately, I had enough purchasing clout in my day job to pretty much ignore them, and go right to the top.

But when the person who answered the phone at the manufacturer had a polytechnic degree, and the experience to go with it, and you got the right answer the first time, guess which manufacturer I stuck with? Making customer service an entry-level poorly-paid position is one of the dumbest things manufacturing corporations ever did. But if that's the direction one lemming goes, they all follow behind without even thinking. There does seem to be some reversal to that trend nowadays. But if a company does start seriously lagging in sales, you'd think they'd take more effort than ever to give purchasers confidence in their service.

Language dialect should be no excuse. English is pretty much the International language
everywhere pertinent. I did run into a Chinese national in one of our NP's here who couldn't speak any English, but spotted the ends of the monorail projecting out from under both sides of my backpack flap, looked at me, and asked, Sinar? I nodded my head, yes, and he gave me two thumbs-up back. Not the first time. There are a lot of Chinese, and one should not underestimate their own interest in film photography. Photrio doesn't even begin to paint the full picture.

 

[smokeandnomirrors]

Hasselblad's existence was saved by interests in China.
The location of the customer service isn't the problem. The problem is the quality of the customer service.

It really depends. I spoke with a few Chinese manufacturers. Some of them are interested in happy customers and really do a great job.

Others told me that they don't need to worry about customer requests for new features, changes etc. because they don't have the same model the west works under, they don't rely on repeat sales. If they sell to somebody, they're done. The next time they sell to somebody else. Their market is essentially infinite as far as they are concerned.

And I was also told by several Chinese companies that the R.O.W. market is not interesting. They have enough customers in China. If they can sell export, fine. If not, it really doesn't bother them.

Of course this varies by company and product, but it was an eye opener for me to have a chance to understand some of the business logic and thinking that goes on, which is totally unlike what I grew up with.

 

[Craig]

And I was also told by several Chinese companies that the R.O.W. market is not interesting. They have enough customers in China. If they can sell export, fine. If not, it really doesn't bother them.

Substitute "Chinese" for "American" and that's not that far from reality either.

 

[DREW WILEY]

There are all kinds of manufacturers in China. If an importer WANTS cheap junk, that is what they get. And there's an incredible amount of that; but the fault lies on both sides of
the ocean. Rooting out the higher quality options can take quite a bit of time and effort,
as some of my former business associates found out after many trips there. But then, there are also small low-volume manufacturers we can deal with directly, some of them producing very high quality products, like Chamonix view camera. That's an enormous
country, and not everyone is the same, anymore than they are here. Sometimes, different quality levels of the same product categories come from the same manufacturer, like the largest optical plant in the world in Xian; it all depends on the specific markets being targeted.

 

[Dan Fromm]

Say what you want, at least the MBA's tend to refrain from making lame jokes about engineers. Even though the opportunities for doing so are tremendously rich indeed.

For the record, I'm neither an engineer, nor do I hold an MBA title. I'm a surprised (appalled) stander-by watching the apparently deeply rooted contempt of people for others they apparently do not (want to) understand. It's one of humanities no so pretty faces.

Hmm. I've worked with, sometimes collided with, a number of MBAs. Some earned respect, others earned contempt. On average, contempt, but giving strangers a chance to show what they can do is better than dismissing them automatically.