In 2018, Dyson had its best financial year ever, with a profit of over a billion pounds. If the company is globally known for its ultra-tech vacuum cleaners and ubiquitous hair dryers, the growth is lead by the new personal care division. For example, the recently launched Airwrap hairstyler, a brand new product in a relatively new category for Dyson, has rapidly become a company bestseller. It's no coincidence, but the result of a long-term strategy. Launching new product lines and conquering rising markets, the most important being for sure Southeast Asia, Dyson doubled its volumes in the last 4 years. To do so, the British company had “to move the epicentre”, says Jim Rowan, Dyson's CEO, which we meet in Singapore, where the company has recently invested over 330 million pounds. More than 1,000 Dyson staff work here - almost half of them are engineers. Every 2.6 seconds one Dyson Digital Motor – the core of most of the company devices, and its most iconic representation – is produced in the heavily-automized local plant. 

Twelve years ago Dyson opened its first plant in the island city-state, with a small team of engineers. Two years later the R&D department moved to a 3,000 square meters area at the Alexandra Technopark. Dyson has continued investing here, and the new Singapore Technology Center, with last-generation labs, was inaugurated at the Science Park in 2017. In the cafeteria, I’m welcomed by local delicacies and a vintage Mini, parked between two tables: Sir James Dyson is a big fan of these little cars, which are for him the iconic representation of how technology can be concentrated in a small space. 

“Only about 6% of our sales are in the UK, right now”, Mr Rowan explains. “We did only manufacture in Asia for 15 years or more. Now we’ve moved research and development, first in the Malaysia Design Center, and then we opened Singapore as an engineer hub. And we started to see the growth”. And so Dyson came to Singapore, this ultra-clean and always blooming Asian city with shopping malls running underground and food stalls awarded by the Michelin guide, a calm megalopolis which has become in the last decades one of the global capital cities of finance, but that also has been recognized as the most technology-ready city by the World Economic Forum.

How important is Asia for you?
We’re growing here in Singapore, in Malaysia, in the Philippines, we have a tech centre in Shanghai. China is different. It’s mainly software that we have in China. There we work on Alexa and Google Assistant integration, and 2 different voice systems in Chinese, so we had to hire two guys to write it in Mandarin. We’ll expand China, we’ll expand the Philippines, and we’re looking a few other places.

And the “old world”?
We have a tech centre in Bristol. It’s difficult to attract people to Malmesbury (where all Dyson's vacuum production was located until 2002, Ed). Bristol offers a good location. And we just opened a new place in London, focusing mainly on marketing. Brexit has nothing to do with this, we planned it before. Europe is a big market for us, is continuing to grow, it’s doing really good for us. We can run projects in parallel. We can also run projects simultaneously. Product development times are beginning to become shorter because products lifecycles are becoming shorter. We’re moving people from here to Malmesbury and from Malmesbury to here. When you’re a young engineer and you move to South East Asia, you can see the manufacturing so much closer. There was this young engineer who designed a product with 20 different types of screws in it. He had to come here and see that such a kind of design makes a product difficult to be manufactured.

Where do you see the company in the near future, let's say 5 years from now?
Five years ago I wouldn’t have guessed that we’d be here, at this point. We come from a hardware company. We became a hardware and electronics company. And then we added software. In the future, there will be much more of A.I. and sensor technology. We’re in floor care, hair care, personal care, environmental care, we’ll be in automotive.

How can you compete in such different sectors? What's your strategy?
Dyson is really disruptor. The hairdryer technology has been the same for fifty years. When we planned to make our hairdryer, we asked ourself how to disrupt this industry. To make it with the best possible handle, we measured lots of hands. We knew that Asia would be a great market and we measured lots of Asian women’s hands. So we figured out the perfect measures. Combined with the digital motor, which does 150,000 rotations for a minute, and the microprocessor, all the components put together are combined to disrupt.

What happens in 15 years?
It’s much more difficult to imagine. It also concerns how you make technology relevant to the customer. Some will be services, I’m sure, and the rest just hardware. We need to be world leaders in A.I., we need to be world leaders in battery technology as well as robotics and sensors. That’s how I think good technology companies build their future. There’s a lot more that we can do. And I think that battery technology will be the big game-changer for us.

What's your approach in designing new products?
We have always been a company that solves problems. To decide what product is coming next, we look at the problems in the world. Important to us is the change in demographics in the world. What do we see? We see mass organization, that’s happening all around the world, a lot more people aware of health. Here in Asia, one big problem is how do you solve air pollution at home. We invented a whole room air purification system, not one that just works for who’s sitting near. We went to China and explain that technology, that’s what made our purifier so successful in China. A lot more people care about the environment. We see an ageing population, but also younger demographics that are more advanced in technology than in the past and expect different things from products.

Are you working on connected devices?
We’re bringing more and more connected products to the world.

How do you work on new products?
There’s an internal process whereby we take a lot of time to figure out what a new product should be. If it’s a product or a new category of products, and which product should be the next one in a category. But we are driven by the problem and the technology that we can bring to market.

Are you scared by copycats and counterfeits?
The real counterfeit problem is coming in data, not in devices.

Let's get back to air purification. It's a problem that in Asia has a total different perception from Europe.
We have to understand that now we build houses that are almost hermetically sealed, and so when we cook, for example, your home can be pretty polluted. You can’t see the sign, but it’s pretty polluted anyway. Some of the nicest emails that I got recently were from the parents of a child with an allergy who could sleep at night for the first time in five years thanks to a Dyson purifier.

Dyson's big new challenge, maybe its biggest challenge ever, is the upcoming electric vehicle. In 2017, James Dyson said that he was going to invest 3 billion dollars into creating an electric car.
EV is a complex project. It’s a brand new industry for us, it’s a big challenge. We have some great ideas about how it’s going to disrupt. We’re trying to learn at the same time. The EV project brings many things together, and it’s difficult when you have to compete with the best in class, people that have been doing this for longer than us.

How do you think that you’re doing it better than, for example, Google?
Let’s take the digital motor. We’re the highest producers of digital motors in the world, we’ve done 16 million of them. When you do something for 10 years, you learn a lot about vibration, heat, about noise, about power and efficiency. We understand pretty well battery and battery technology, and BMS (battery management system, Ed.). Part of electric vehicles is, of course, airflow: we’re pretty good in it. And purification: people want clean air in the vehicle, right temperature and humidity. We've it. But it’s still a complex project.

Do you think you have the sufficient size to roll how such a business?
There’s no way that we can enter every EV market in the world. I think that the world is changing as well in terms of distribution, how you distribute products in general. We’re looking at all the different options.

What’s the schedule?
It will be launched in 2020, 2021. It’s going to be a tight timeline for us, but realistic.

Are you on time?
We’ve got more than 600 people working on the project already, we’ve worked on it for more than three years now. We’ve got a couple of years to go and so, yes, we’re comfortable with the timelines. But as comfortable as you can be with a brand new project.

Will it be autonomous?
It’s a conversation that’s ongoing. Probably not fully autonomous at the release time.

Do you have any idea about the price?
Yes. But I’m not telling you.

Will you go out with the EV if it’s less than perfect?
No, we won’t. We’re a private company, we’re not governed by Wall Street. So we can just look in the long term and decide how much to invest and when. We cancelled products very late in the day because they didn’t meet our quality criteria.

How can you disrupt a market that’s already going through disruption?
I was at the Shanghai Motor Show after two years. Many things have changed. More people focus on the EV. A lot of Chinese manufacturers are more on the connectivity side, on the autonomous side. Our is not disruption for disruption, we want to provide a product that adds value and solves problems. How do you use 5G? We’re working on that, for example.

Why a very conventional car and not, let’s say, electric scooters? 
We considered that we could do the difference with the car.

How important is Asia for you?
We’re growing here in Singapore, in Malaysia, in the Philippines, we have a tech centre in Shanghai. China is different. It’s mainly software that we have in China. There we work on Alexa and Google Assistant integration, and 2 different voice systems in Chinese, so we had to hire two guys to write it in Mandarin. We’ll expand China, we’ll expand the Philippines, and we’re looking a few other places.

And the “old world”?
We have a tech centre in Bristol. It’s difficult to attract people to Malmesbury (where all Dyson's vacuum production was located until 2002, Ed). Bristol offers a good location. And we just opened a new place in London, focusing mainly on marketing. Brexit has nothing to do with this, we planned it before. Europe is a big market for us, is continuing to grow, it’s doing really good for us. We can run projects in parallel. We can also run projects simultaneously. Product development times are beginning to become shorter because products lifecycles are becoming shorter. We’re moving people from here to Malmesbury and from Malmesbury to here. When you’re a young engineer and you move to South East Asia, you can see the manufacturing so much closer. There was this young engineer who designed a product with 20 different types of screws in it. He had to come here and see that such a kind of design makes a product difficult to be manufactured.

Where do you see the company in the near future, let's say 5 years from now?
Five years ago I wouldn’t have guessed that we’d be here, at this point. We come from a hardware company. We became a hardware and electronics company. And then we added software. In the future, there will be much more of A.I. and sensor technology. We’re in floor care, hair care, personal care, environmental care, we’ll be in automotive.

What do you think about this everything-is-connected that's going on in consumer tech today?
I think that people have gone through the first phase of IoT. I was at the CES a couple of years ago and everything was connected, even coffee cups. That’s such a waste of engineers and dollars. We’re moving to the next phase. And for me, the application layer on a smartphone is cumbersome a lot of the times to the product itself. I put a new lighting system at home and showed my father that I could turn the lights on and off with my smartphone. And my father told hame that he could turn them using the switch. So, what is the point? Our machines will be connected, but it's more important that they will have intelligence embedded inside. For example, our new V11 vacuum that recognizes surfaces for cleaning optimization. Or it makes sense if a robot cleans the house just before you come back in the evening.

What's Dyson position about digital assistants?
The voice channel is an interesting channel for us. So if you have a smart home and want to say “Goodnight Alexa” to turn off all the machines, that's ok for us. But we also want the machines to have embedded intelligence. The difference won’t be in the connectivity but in the intelligence. And the connectivity will become a requirement.

Let's get back to Singapore. Do you think that moving the R&D center to Asia changed you?
Yes, absolutely. We learned a lot. In Japan and Korea and in the South East of Asia there’s a different flavour, people search for different things. For example, there’s mass customization, people want to customize when they buy from dyson.com. And so we had to design a supply chain that could face this request. Asia has an ageing demographics and so we are changing our portfolio of products accordingly. Where we see a problem, we try to solve it. Dyson will never play in the volume space. We play in the value space.