Strategic Convergence

Our highly engineered products provide accurate and reliable control of fluids, often in critical applications, and can be broken down as follows:

• The control – valves to impede or isolate, flow actuators to open and close valves and positioners/controllers to activate and regulate actuators.
• The type of fluid – steam, gas, oxygen, air, reagents and water.
• The operating parameters – orifice size (can range from 0.2mm for dosing equipment in our Fluid Power business up to 3m for main stream isolation valves for gas fired power plants in our Severe Service business).

The core competencies common to all of IMI’s businesses are Key Account Management and Engineering Advantage. IMI is increasing its investment in these two key areas to underpin the Group’s aspirations of accelerating top line growth and delivering further margin improvement.

Key Account Management

Highly talented, customer-focused entrepreneurial-minded teams of people in IMI add long-term value for both customers and ourselves. Developing these skills, understanding the drivers of our customers’ businesses, and our own, and ensuring that we work with the best customer partners, are critical components of our business model. Recognising where value can be added for both parties is a fundamental part of our approach. A centrally-based ‘KAM Academy’ helps train our people and ensure best practice is shared across the Group.

Engineering Advantage

We invest in techniques that improve market understanding and customer insight. We then apply our acquired knowledge and our engineering capabilities to the issues faced by our customers. The result is relevant, bespoke technologies and new products that create real value and strengthen our customer relationships. This core capability effectively engineers solutions that provide advantages for our customers and we refer to this as Engineering Advantage.

Market characteristics

Essential to our long term success is understanding the characteristics of the markets we aim to operate in. For IMI this means:

• Niche global markets of no more than $3-4 billion
• Where we already hold or can achieve a market leadership position;
• Where we can clearly differentiate ourselves from our competitors with end-user insight and the application of innovative technology;
• Where there is the opportunity to work with large leading blue chip customers who value this differentiation; and
• Where there is an extensive aftermarket opportunity.

The global trends shaping our future and providing higher than average growth opportunities for IMI include:

• Climate Change – with opportunities for IMI to provide solutions for cleaner energy (such as liquified natural gas and nuclear), improved energy efficiency and better environmental control;
• Resource Scarcity – with opportunities for IMI in process improvement and automation;
• Urbanisation in the emerging economies – with major opportunities for IMI around building design and mass transit infrastructure; and
• Ageing Population – with its rising aspirations for a more balanced and healthier lifestyle and an improved quality and longevity of life.