2 years on since starting Waninge Consultancy, this is what some customers have had to say:
“Waninge Consultancy supported us to expand our global exposure to the Japanese market. As this sounds rather trivial, for me it doesn’t. Without a strong partner like Waninge Consultancy it would have been almost impossible to be successful, especially in a short period of time. Within a period of 8 months together we were able to build a strategy, open a local office and hire the right resources to run the new activities locally. The result is a solid pipeline of business projects. We are confident to start commercial activities within 2019, less than 2 years after our first contact.
Jan Waninge is a great person to work with. He and I have known each other since the beginning of my career in 1988 when I started working in his project team. With his more than 30 years of international business experiences working for a multinational company, Jan brings the right mix of a strong business acumen, goal orientation and pragmatism. This in combination with his understanding of both the western and Japanese (business) culture makes him a great asset for non-Japanese companies to enter the Japanese market and shorten the time-to-market significantly.
I recommend Jan Waninge to anyone who intends to extend his or her business to Japan.”
Ron Bult
Director Global Sales
Domo Engineering Plastics
“Waninge Consultancy has proven to be a very useful partner in developing our position in Japan. They have been very effective in introducing us at senior levels at Japanese companies, helped us to sharpen our message and bridge the cultural and language differences. Because of their expertise and service attitude they are felt to be part of our team and are highly valuable for Zymergen.”
Richard Pieters
President Products
Zymergen
“PlenSat is a start-up company with operations in USA (California) and Europe (The Netherlands). PlenSat is developing a medical device to help people to fight overweight and obesity. This device, ‘Digestible Balloons’, is positioned as a safe, convenient, more affordable and better performing therapy than bariatric surgery (bypassing or restricting the stomach) or gastric balloons (filling stomach space). Currently the device is in clinical trials in Europe and we expect to launch in 2020. Asia is seeing a large growth of people suffering from obesity and I approached Jan Waninge to see if we could collaborate together to evaluate and prepare for market introduction of PlenSat Digestible Balloons in Asia. I worked and interacted with Jan for many years in DSM and because of his many years of working experience in Japan and Asia in general, he is perfectly positioned to understand both cultures and to facilitate the move from Europe to Asia. The medical device industry and regulations are complex, but Jan found his way through this ‘jungle’, used his network to get access to the right people and came up with a business plan for Asia plus a recommendation regarding which Asian countries would be best to introduce first. We were impressed with the speed and quality of the work and we are looking forward to collaborate further with Jan when we start clinical approval processes in Asia.”
Erik Rutten
Executive Vice President Business Development
PlenSat B.V. (The Netherlands)
PlenSat Inc. (California, USA)
“Jan Waninge has been employed as consultant for Alufluor AB since 2016. Alufluor is a leading producer of chemicals for the aluminium and the glass industry located in Helsingborg, Sweden.
Jan has been engaged by Alufluor to establish direct sales to the optical glass industry in Japan. The company has become the leading supplier of aluminium fluoride to fluorite glass. The glass lenses are produced by Hoya, O’hara and Nikon for system cameras and surveillance cameras. They require the highest possible quality and consistency for their raw materials to achieve top performance and minimum reject rates in the production. It is therefore of outmost importance that the customers have full confidence in Alufluor.
Jan Waninge has become a very strong bridge between our Swedish operations and the Japanese market. He has all the required business skills paired with very strong technical competence to be able to communicate with world leading companies in the field.
He has also a profound knowledge about Japan and how to create strong business relations on the Japanese market. Jan is very analytical and he can be engaged even for the most complex tasks in Japan and elsewhere.
I strongly recommend Jan and I continue to trust him with one of Alufluor’s most important and challenging businesses.”
Göran Karlsson
Managing Director
Alufluor AB