Market Opportunities for Priva Building Management System in Chinese Living and Working environment

Abstract

The master graduation project is carried out to help the Dutch company Priva find out the market opportunities in China for her LWE (living and working environment) segment in the Chinese market. Figuring out if Chinese building automation market will be valuable for Priva to enter in now and what product and marketing strategy should be designed was the main objective of this project. Six research questions are designed to guide the research process, which will be answered in the six chapters in this report. Chapter one gives on overview of the building management system industry background knowledge. It is known that the building management system products have intimate relationship with the building market and is part of the intelligent building system which is very dependent on system integrators. In the building value chain in China, there are six stakeholders, four of which have certain influences on the decision making of building automation facilities—the project investor/building owner, Facility managers, designers, building end users. Chapter two introduces the current product portfolio and business strategy of Priva and analyzed the core competence of the company. Currently Priva is very dependent on partners which provide sales channels for the company and integrate product components into an entire building energy management system for the building owner. The core technology competence of Priva is the good quality of the hardware products and outstanding design and user experience of the software products. Chapter three describes the situation of Chinese building management system market, segments the building market as the future building management market, and selects the hospital vertical market for Priva as the niche market segment. A market entry decision is suggested and a new product design is required to meet the market demands. Chapter four shows the new product concept generation process. The hesitant customer group in the Chinese hospitals is selected as the target customer group of Priva. Product functions and working principles are designed according to the user needs research and previous results of company analysis and market analysis. The design is a combination of a software product and a set of simple physical modules. The product is independent on the system integrators and used to create the awareness of the connection between the comfort management and the energy management. Chapter five provides future recommendations on the business model of the new product and a licensee strategy is suggested. How to design the product details and user experiences and how to find a new partner in the Chinese market are the future research fields.