Electro Rent plays hand to become global brand

16th September 2019

Mick Elliott

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Electro-Rent will phase out its Microlease and Livingston brands as it pushes to build a global presence and look to penetrate new market sectors. A brand change campaign will continue throughout 2019, with a switch over complete in 2020.

George Acris (pictured), Vice President, Marketing for Electro-Rent says the company will be careful to support the Microlease and Livingston brands in countries, like Germany and the Netherlands where they are well entrenched, until customers are comfortable with the new brand.

A new global CEO has been appointed to direct the strategy, which involves multi-million dollar investments on a host of new initiatives.

Jay Geldmacher joins from Artesyn Embedded Technologies, which was formerly Emerson’s Embedded Computing and Power Business, where he was President and Chief Executive Officer.

He succeeds Nigel Brown who becomes Chairman and advisor.

The company, which rents and leases test and measurement equipment, will roll out a new global website and an eCommerce service to customers, and introduce a specific My Electro-Rent portal for customers.

Earlier this year it revealed it had splashed $10m on test equipment for the emerging 5G mobile communications standard in the past 12 months

Next year it will also introduce a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, which is under beta test, enabling Electro-Rent to offer a seamless service to its customers.

And to help the customer process, Electro-Rent has 600 experts to help with technical and procurement advice.

Acris points to a growing trend for users to rent and lease test and measurement equipment.

“Customers are moving from a CapEx strategy to OpEx models and an ingrained culture of buying equipment is beginning to change,” he explains. “Users have to be more flexible. Time to market pressures means they have to prototype products faster, and rental provides a faster and more sensible proposition.”

He sees five major growth opportunities going forward in 5G, autonomous driving, power, high speed digital and data centres.

Citing a Frost & Sullivan report Acris remarks, “These opportunities represent a third of the total revenue opportunities for test and measurement equipment suppliers up to 2022.”

Electro-Rent strengthened its position in the power and industrial markets with the acquisition of Intellirent in August last year, and it has relationships with blue-chip test and measurement vendors.