8 minute read
FIRST LOOK: FELIX ERDMANN
THE HEAD OF N&M MIDDLE EAST DISCUSSES THE COMPANY’S EXTENSIVE WORKS FOR EXPO 2020.
With Expo 2020 just around the corner, it’s safe to say that it’s an incredibly busy time for Neumann&Müller (N&M) Middle East. Entrusted with the design and delivery of 10 pavilion projects, as well as several planned live events on Expo site, the company is growing rapidly to meet the demand. “We are growing our team massively, not only for the Expo 2020 projects but also to grow our presence generally here in the Middle East,” commented N&M Dubai’s Felix Erdmann. “We are currently in the process of doubling our full-time employee numbers over the next two to three months.” Here, the Co-Managing Director tells TPMEA about the challenges involved in doubling the company’s workforce and reveals a few details on the company’s much-anticipated delivery at the Expo 2020 site.
What is your role at Expo 2020? We are honoured to have been chosen to design and deliver 10 pavilion projects, as well as several planned live events on Expo site. The site will require a massive, coordinated workforce, so, for this project alone, we will have around 180 people operating the stages in three shifts.
How much of a challenge has it been to find the right people to join the team? It’s always a challenge to recruit good people. We don’t want to have low or mid-level people – we’re looking for highly skilled personnel in every position. We are recruiting internationally for the best people in their field. We have a dedicated team who are focused purely on finding the right recruits and then helping them integrate into the company quickly. We will have people from all around the world; there are around 16 nationalities within the team so far, but this will jump significantly over the next month or so.
We’ve noticed some top local talent has joined your ranks as well recently… One of our strategies is to have a good mixture of local and international staff. It’s important to have some people who are well connected and comfortable in the region with experience of working here. It’s a good diverse team that we’re putting together.
Has the COVID-19 pandemic made it easier to pick up top talent that wasn’t available before? Some companies are changing their business models or reducing their presence, which can have an effect, but that hasn’t been a big factor. Most of the really good people in the industry have still been busy throughout the pandemic, so while we have been able to get some top talent, it was more because they saw the value of what we were doing as opposed to them not having anything else to do.
We are changing our position in the market at the moment. We’ve had a presence in the Middle East for 15 years, but it is only in the past three or four years that a much greater focus has been put on the region. Now we have a really strong business plan in place to grow our presence here and develop a sustainable business that will continue to thrive long after Expo for the decades to come. This mission attracts people to join us.
How will the company maintain the current pace of rapid growth after Expo 2020? I moved to Dubai at the start of 2018 because we had a strong business plan for the Middle East. In that plan, Expo 2020 was just one of many milestones. Expo is our agent of growth, but there is much more to come after that. We really see a bright future here – in fact, the Middle East is where we see the highest potential for growth internationally. Look across the border to Saudi Arabia and what’s going on there with the massive political and cultural change and there are so many opportunities to grow. Nowhere else in the world has such a good opportunity.
How do you see the company developing in terms of the split between the live events and systems integration sides of the business? We are going to push them both ahead. We still have a strong belief in the events market. The Middle East, especially Dubai, has positioned itself as the safest place to travel to, and I think in Q3 and Q4, we will see lots of corporate events happening here. A lot of our clients are sick and tired of virtual events, and they just want to have a proper in-person event where they can meet face-to-face again – and Dubai could well be the place for this to happen.
We come from an events background, so it will always be something that is important to
the business. That said, systems integration will be the larger division as by the nature of the projects, they are mostly bigger scale. We will keep pushing both and possibly in the future look to add even more lines to the business.
Do you think hybrid events will remain important at least for the time being? I think that hybrid is not only going to stick for the short term, but it will be around for the long term. The world has learned that it doesn’t make sense for some people to travel long distances just for a one-day event. Maybe that will make everyone a little bit more sustainable in the future.
It’s the purely digital events as we’ve been experiencing over the past 18 months that I think are most likely to drop off. We’ve seen in our own internal meetings, while conference calling is efficient and a more sustainable way of working, there’s really no substitute for an in-person experience from a social aspect.
Are there any standout projects at Expo 2020 that we should be looking out for? The Brazil Pavilion is the largest pavilion project we are working on at the moment. It’s especially challenging because it’s not a solid structure like the other pavilions – it’s more like a tent with a membrane, which we are projecting 360° onto the surface of with around 130 projectors of totally different range. We’re using everything from Panasonic PT-RQ50Ks to small BenQ projectors, because they were the only ones that were able to have the right throw ratio. It’s a very challenging piece of projection geometry and we spent a lot of time designing the system and redesigning the system as some of the site conditions changed.
It’s not just the projection geometry that is challenging. It’s basically outdoor, there is no AC, so we have to put all the projectors into moisture-proof housing. As we had such a wide range of different projectors, we had to find a partner in Switzerland to fabricate custom-built housings for each projector.
What have been the biggest challenges so far? There are so many challenges every day, it’s very hard to say what the biggest ones are! Certainly, the timeline is always critical. We can never sit back and relax. Most of the procurement items are time sensitive as well.
The one-year postponement has been a challenge, because it has meant a strange situation where clients don’t have much additional budget for the extended project periods, but they still request your services in the interim. It’s not like we froze the projects completely over the past year – some clients are very creative, and many have used the extra year to make changes to their pavilions.
A project that was planned for six or eight months is now 18 or 20 months. We went into the project planning for a sprint, but we found ourselves in a marathon. So, that’s a challenge for the team to maintain energy levels throughout.
What kind of legacy do you think Expo 2020 will leave for Dubai? Legacy has always been one of the strategic goals for Expo 2020. The organisers didn’t want it just to last for six months, but they wanted the site to become a new district. From what I hear from a lot of the pavilions we are working with, most of them will remain there and become part of the legacy site.
I hope that the Expo 2020 site will fulfil its potential and become a hub for innovation for much longer than the duration of the show, and I think it is a much better setup than many other expos have been in the past to be able to do exactly that. Photos: N&M Dubai www.neumannmueller.com
