INTERVIEW: EGIL HOGNA 19
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Strength in Sapa A year after Egil Hogna took on the role of CEO at Sapa, Nadine Bloxsome* caught up with him to find out how he has settled in and his main priorities for the company.
“My first year has been very busy, but also very interesting,” says Egil. “It’s been a year of a lot of learning and also some nice progress for Sapa.” A new job always comes with new challenges and a time limit on the excuse that you are ‘new’ and the real work begins. Egil Hogna, however, got straight into his role as Sapa’s CEO back in September 2015 and began by taking a tour of the company’s many facilities around the world. The tour was highly publicised, not just throughout Sapa, but also across the industry and showed a new way of bringing together people, products and knowledge. “The tour was really important for my own learning and of course I also realised that you cannot lead a company like Sapa from behind a desk,” says Egil. “It is the people who work on production and meet with our customers every day who have the best knowledge as to where our challenges are and the most important improvements we need to make.” It can be easy at times to overlook this knowledge amongst workers and the tour was focused on bringing ideas to the table and collaborating across the company. “Sometimes people say ‘if only Sapa knew how much Sapa knows’,” says Egil. “We can find an enormous wealth of knowledge if we look in the right place.” Safety first “When you start in a new job, the first thing is to learn the business and find out what the challenges are and what needs to be done,” continues Egil. “What I found was that the company was in the midst of a very important and exciting improvement journey, which during the first two years after the Joint Venture was established, included a lot of restructuring. Our top priority however, is safety and I’m very glad that the strong improvement we saw in 2015 in terms of reaching a safety
“We want to build on our uniqueness and cover the needs of our customers
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better than anyone else.
level of less than 3 recordable injuries for every 1 million working hours, we have been able to keep going in 2016.” All about aluminium Coming from a different industrial background has meant that Egil has had to learn what aluminium has to offer. “I find the aluminium industry tremendously exciting – it is very much about shaping a sustainable future for this planet,” he says. “I am starting to learn more about our competing materials. I realise aluminium is still a young material and the world has a lot to learn about how we can exploit all of the benefits,” he continues. “When I started working with aluminium, I thought that most of the benefits were linked to its lower weight, but I have since realised that it is so much more; for example the ability to absorb energy. I believe that aluminium should be the starting point for all automotive producers to build a base from, but this is still far away from where we are today. Most of the world’s car manufacturers have built an enterprise around steel, so there is a long way to go before we can truly say that they are building aluminium cars. There are pioneers out there who are reshaping the industry with companies like Sapa and our engineering knowledge can
help other automotive companies become more aluminium-based manufacturers.” It is clear from the passionate nature in which Egil addresses the topic of aluminium in automotive manufacturing that this is a strong focus at Sapa, but it seems there is still a lot more of the aluminium story to tell. “I think in terms of volumes of change that we are seeing now, automotive seems very important, but there are other industries where aluminium hasn’t been invested in as much, but there are still great opportunities,” he says. “An example of that is marine and offshore, where the historical focus has primarily been in steel. This has lead to high maintenance costs and higher fuel costs than necessary. We now have the technology to produce long and wide panels of aluminium that can be used in these applications. You also have something as basic as building, where aluminium has become even more relevant than in the past because of the need to build both taller buildings and buildings for example with better earthquake resistance.” Take on the industry While global trends are clearly creating a strong growth in demand, a challenge for the upstream industry remains.
*Editor, Aluminium International Today Aluminium International Today
Extrusion egil hogna.indd 1
November/December 2016
04/11/2016 11:03:55