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News “Integrity, reliability and quality are a fundamental aspect of who we are” Daniel and Andreas Sennheiser Joint CEO, Sennheiser Two Heads Are Better than One The Sennheiser brothers continue the work of their father and grandfather Sennheiser operates with an unusual business model: two people share the role of CEO. Daniel and Andreas Sennheiser spoke to IFA International about the future of their company. What was behind the idea of having joint CEOs – and how do you work together? Dr Andreas Sennheiser: For me, it transpired relatively early on that I would become involved in the company. After my Ph.D I worked at Hilti in Liechtenstein, which was a formative time for me. Three years ago I made the move to Sennheiser and was responsible for lean management as well as the strategic supply chain design, focusing on strengthening the value-added processes and orientation towards reinforcing customer added value. Daniel Sennheiser: For a long time I didn’t really see any specific role for me within Sennheiser; the company is traditionally very engineer-driven, and rightly so. However, as we have just seen with headphones, advertising and design are becoming ever more important, and it has become apparent that my contribution can be relevant. What are your goals and aims for the future? DS: Our goals are to continue our sustainable growth strategy where our independence is above all important. To make our customers happy, surprise them with the substance, quality and detail of our products. What are your ambitions in the consumer market? DS: We have an exciting pipeline of new products, addressing several market segments, which we will bring to the market over the next twelve months. These products will underline our innovation capability, technology leadership and our design/style philosophy. What will be your biggest challenges moving forward? DS: One of the challenges facing us in the coming years will be how to improve an already excellent service and further enhance our customer focus. Our objective is to satisfy increasingly specific customer requirements for our products and service; we don’t wish simply to fulfil the individual expectations and wishes of our customers, we seek to exceed them. Hall 3.2 Stand 104 ADVERTORIAL When a Word Can Paint a Thousand Pictures Rovi and Nuance join forces to enable voice-activated guidance Rovi and Nuance Communications issued a joint statement at IFA 2013 announcing the expansion of their relationship to advance voice activated guidance and content discovery applications for digital entertainment customers across the globe. Analysts estimate the mobile speech recognition market will grow more than ten fold in the next four years. That’s because with a mind-boggling choice of music, movies and other program content available across multiple viewing platforms, users are seeking easier ways of accessing what they want, where they want it. By expanding Rovi’s capabilities to use Nuance’s voice and natural language understanding capabilities with Rovi’s broad movie, TV and music database, the power of connected content is able to be brought to virtually any device. Additionally, Nuance has signed a multi-year data licensing agreement for Rovi Video and Rovi Music and will integrate Rovi’s rich entertainment data for multiple countries worldwide with Nuance’s Dragon TV as well as Nuance’s broad mobile voice and language understanding platforms shipping on TVs, PCs and mobile devices. Thanks to the new platform, people will be able to say, “Recommend movies like 42’; “Show me similar TV programs to The Middle; “What else is Matthew McConaughey in? and “Recommend summer songs like Surfing Safari by the Beach Boys,” and will be instantly transported to their desired content. Hall 25 Stand 151 www.ifa-international.org IFA International • Tuesday 10 th September 2013 13
