Electronics: manufacturer takes youth approach  

Manufacturing is run by middle-aged men right? Wrong. One electronics company in Vilnius has a young female leadership.

"The management team is rather young, and with a high education level and fluent in English. The average age is 32 years. The workforce is mainly women with a stable family situation and a background in the electronics industry,” director and owner Palle Gravesen Jensen said.

Jensen told The Baltic Times that although the makeup of the team wasn’t a conscious choice, things have worked out well.

"It wasn’t intentional, it just happened like that — I’ve got nothing against older management teams,” he said.

"My young management team has a lot of advantages and very few disadvantages. We picked them up after they finished school and we trained them. They have a good level of education, a lot of knowledge — they think about what we can do in this world. Some other people think about what they could do in Lithuania, but my team thinks what they could do in this world and they deal with foreign clients in Scandinavia or Asia very well,” he said.

Gravesen Jensen concedes that while he has a quick-witted team, fostering a youth ethic in a traditional field such as manufacturing can have some cultural drawbacks.

"The only problem with my young team is that in Lithuania there is a cultural problem with young people negotiating with older colleagues,” he said.

Electronic House is a Danish company that was born when UAB Metalco Baltic split in two and started specializing in the export of pre-assembled cables and cable harnesses for the food and agriculture business, primarily in Scandanavia.

Electronic House has been operating in Lithuania since 1994 in this capacity. Gravesen Jensen said his company is the leader for this sort of little-known but important product.

"I think we are the biggest in the Baltics for this. We add a bit more for the customer with added assemblies and mechanical parts or electronics,” he said.

His two companies produce industrial parts and electronic wares that are mostly sold in the agriculture and food-processing business in Scandinavia.

"Welding robots, windmills, printing machines, industrial vacuums, trains in the London Underground system, hand grenades, disabled chair lifts. Sometimes we don’t know what they are used for because it is secret,” Gravesen Jensen said "Everything that uses electricity uses cables.”

Danish companies have been coming to Lithuania for quite some time, and some say there is a strong historical link between the two countries. Gravesen Jensen saw an opportunity in Lithuania’s largely unused workforce.

"When I started here in 1994 it was early days for the Baltics, but I chose Lithuania because Finland had Estonia, and Latvia was taken, and I found Lithuania to have a large workforce who were skilled. They were highly skilled — like anywhere in the world,” he said.

Originally Gravesen had started the company Metalco Baltic UAB, which then saw demand for electronic parts and created Electronic House to differentiate his business and find new clients.

"After a period of successfully serving few clients, it was decided to make it a separate business called Electronic House UAB. Electronic House UAB was the established in the year 2000,” Gravesen Jensen said.