Strategy - Silvio Napoli at Schindler India

Table of Contents


  1. Introduction

Schindler India is a part of the Schindler group, the largest supplier of escalators and the second largest manufacturer of elevators worldwide.  Schindler’s presence in India can be traced back to 1925, when the first Schindler elevator was installed, however it was not until the late 1950’s when they appointed a local distributor, with the next step being taken almost 40 years later to open its own wholly owned subsidiary.  

Schindler as a firm was established in 1874 in Switzerland by Robert Schindler and elevator manufacturing began in 1889. Almost a century later, Alfred N. Schindler became the fourth generation of the family to lead the firm with an aim to transform the Company’s culture from a purely engineering based manufacturing company to one of a customer oriented service company. Schindler in the meanwhile had progressed to being the leader in producing elevators and escalators with worldwide revenues of 6.6 billion Swiss Francs (US $4 billion). The company employed over 38000 people worldwide in 97 subsidiaries, but yet to have any operations in India a market that Alfred N. Schindler felt had great potential.

 Schindler’s presence in India was limited to a long term distribution agreement with ECE in 1958 that when terminated in 1985 resulted in entering into a technical collaboration with Bharat Bijlee (BBL) to manufacture, market and sell its elevators and also acquiring a 12% equity stake in BBL. BBL consequently with the support of Schindler became the number two player in the Indian elevator market with a 10 – 15% share a decade later.

Alfred N. Schindler always felt that the Indian market had great potential and thus on assuming the role of chairman in 1995, he undertook a sabbatical for 6 months wherein he travelled through several important markets China, Japan and also several weeks in India traversing almost the entire country that reinforced his belief of the great growth potential that India had for Schindler. (Fagan, Yoshino et al. 2004)

  1. Silvio Napoli

In 1996 Schindler proposed a new venture that will get it more management control of the Joint that they had with BBL. The subsequent talks to resolve this proved difficult thus resulting in the dilution of the collaboration that Schindler had with BBL. Schindler subsequently began to consider options to establish its own operations. This task was entrusted with Silvio Napoli who had joined Schindler in September 1994 as head of Corporate Planning reporting directly to the CEO after graduating from the MBA program at Harvard University.

Silvio Napoli’s career began as head of Corporate Planning and as staff to the Corporate Executive Committee known as Verwaltungsrat Ausschuss (VRA) that was composed of Alfred Schindler (Chairman), Luc Bonnard (Vice chairman) & Alfred Spoerri (Chief Financial Officer) he was entrusted with taking meeting minutes and following up on the action items and special project that were discussed by the VRA.

Silvio Napoli first major project involved the Swatch Project that primarily revolved around developing a Standardized elevator at a significantly lower cost than existing broad line of Customized products. This involved significant changes to the existing processes in place that consequently resulted in the development of the S001, an elevator that could not be customized and also used many parts from external suppliers that led to halving the cycle time of 20 – 30 weeks.

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In the meanwhile as previously mentioned negotiations with BBL broke down in India, consequently resulting in the VRA engaging the Boston Consulting Group for suitable local partners with Napoli being the reference point for this project, however during this time it became legally possible to start up a 100% wholly owned company in India. The VRA on learning this as well as the lack of finding any suitable partners instructed Napoli to investigate further on opening a wholly owned company in India.

Napoli consequently contacted various people in India to enable him to understand the magnitude of this challenge ...

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