Clever cats stay in touch with Mother Nature

By LIBBY MIDDLEBROOK

The horticultural industry is as temperamental as a stroppy teenager.

Rain, wind, sun and hail can bring the summer harvest to a grinding halt while movements in offshore markets have the ability to squash growers' incomes.

That can make life especially unpleasant for many businesses in the horticultural industry, including Lynx Horticultural Systems, an electronics company which designs and sells fruit sizers for apples, pears, kiwifruit and tomatoes.

But over its 10-year history, the Auckland company has managed to avoid most of the effects of Mother Nature's fickle personality, tripling sales from $600,000 in 1990 to an expected turnover of $1.8 million for the 1999/2000 year.

Its customer base has increased from 12 local clients to about 170 during the same period, with 90 per cent of their sales stretching from Washington DC in the US to Australia's Queensland coast.

So why has the tiny company blossomed into a horticultural success story?

"The clever part of this business is the electronics, the hardware and the software," said Lynx director Ted Jackett, who purchased the company with electronics designer Warren Evans and two other investors 10 years ago.

"When we took over the company it was engaged in trying to provide total systems, that was just too wide. We stripped it back to what we believed was the most important part of the whole system and focused on what we think we do best, electronics."

Formerly known as AWA, an Australian-owned consumer electronics company, Lynx was one of the first in the world to develop an apple colour recognition system, allowing growers to electronically grade fruit depending on colour coverage.

Even more unique, Lynx utilised the design skills of Warren Evans to add the colour recognition technology to its PC-driven systems, without having to alter the original electronic hardware panel at the core of its grading systems. Other hardware and software enhancements such Microsoft windows compatibility, reject analysis, weight recognition and a fruit labelling facility have also been thrown into the mix without the company having to change its 15-year-old base electronics control hardware.

"Because of diminishing returns, people are looking for technical upgrades to give them the leading edge without having to buy a new machine. There are many people who can't afford to purchase new," said Mr Jackett.

"We've been offering what we call Retrofit for some time now and it's been pretty pivotal in terms of our operation. The product we had 10 years ago is still the same today. Throughout our development process we've been mindful of not going off on a tangent. We've maintained backward compatibility throughout."

Today, Lynx's Retrofit operation accounts for 75 per cent of its business and has allowed the company to gain greater market share as well as the flexibility of carrying out minor $1500 upgrades to installing new multi-million dollar systems.

Lynx has just secured a $1.2 million contract for an enormous ten-lane Kiwifruit grading and weighing machine in Te Puke for Seeka Kiwifruit Industries, a New Zealand packing and distribution company representing more than 200 growers.

Lynx is not the only New Zealand company revolutionising the way growers and packers run their operations. Its main competitor, Compac Automation, which is also based in Auckland, has about 100 employees. Almost 80 per cent of its machines are sold overseas and annual turnover exceeds $10 million. Last year, a Compac sorting machine helped to salvage a frost-ravaged orange crop from Golden Valley Citrus in California. The client paid to have Compac's 10-tonne machine flown to the US on a Boeing 747.

Meanwhile, Mr Jackett, who ran AWA's horticultural arm, and Mr Evans, who worked as an AWA designer, say Lynx has come a long way since 1990 when they purchased the company with two other investors for $500,000, including intellectual property and tools.

Lynx now employs four people at its North Shore office and contracts out all of its of its manufacturing to New Zealand companies.

"When we took over it was part of a big corporation and it had unhappy staff and unhappy customers. We bought a personal touch and that turned out to be a fairly good formula. As it grew, we decided that we didn't need financial members, we wanted hands-on help, so now its just Warren and I," said Mr Jackett.

Lynx, which sends representatives to the US several times a year to generate new business and service existing clients' machinery, plans to increase its focus on the US and Australian markets. Sales and marketing manager Phil Jones said the company had appointed two agents in those countries to promote and sell its grading systems.

"It's taken us a long time to establish ourselves in the US, I mean, why should someone in the US buy a system from someone in New Zealand when they've probably got someone to purchase from five miles down the road. It's taking time but we're slowly getting there."

Mr Evans said Lynx, which ploughs back most of its profits into research and development, was keen to break into the citrus fruit market with graders and sizers, although access to new technology was an ongoing problem from its New Zealand base.

"It's particularly challenging working from New Zealand, you just don't have everything at your fingertips like you do in the US. It's hard to be working with leading edge components when New Zealand just can't provide them. We've made a change to our system and I ordered the parts in August last year and I still don't have them," said Mr Evans, who now stocks up on components during visits to the US.

Mr Jackett said another issue for Lynx was predicting movements in the horticultural market in order to decide which areas of research and development to invest in.

"It's difficult to write a business plan that's going to be exact because things change all the time. Through our experience we rely a lot on instinct."