Mr. Richenhagen: AGCO is a Fortune 500 company. AGCO was founded in 1990 by a management buyout and went public in 1992. The company started rather small, with 200 million in revenues, and then grew through about 30 acquisitions within the next 15 years. I've been with the company now six years. When I came over, I changed the direction a little bit. We had done these many acquisitions, but we started to work on a real post-merger integration and making a real business out of it. In 2008 we peaked with 8.4 billion in revenues. We are now number three in our industry, and we are the biggest manufacturer of farm equipment. Our main competitors - number one, John Deere, and number two, CNH - also do farm equipment. We are a focused manufacturer of farm equipment only.
TWST: You mentioned you were at the helm of the company during that time frame. Tell us more about the changes you made and how they relate to the company's focus today.
Mr. Richenhagen: When you join a company, you basically talk to people in order to find out what they expect from you, and everybody was asking me about the strategy of the company and to define our strategy first top-down. The vision of AGCO is high-tech solutions for professional farmers feeding the world, which means that the focus is not only on farm equipment, but also on equipment for the big professional farms. We did do a lot of major changes in that time. We invested a lot of money, much more money, in research and development. It's now around 200 million to 220 million every year, compared to 50 million five, six years ago.
We have reduced the number of brands. AGCO had a portfolio of 26 different brands, which was of course something that was very complicated and could not be supported very much in marketing. We basically reduced the number of brands down to four. We use two of them here in the U.S., and the two brands for America are Massey Ferguson and Challenger. Challenger is a brand which came with the acquisition of the Caterpillar farm equipment division. We also reorganized our distribution. In the past, we had plenty of dealers, but a lot of either very small dealers or we were very small in big dealerships. And so we tried to create a stronger, more focused distribution here in the U.S. Our main problem, so to speak, or the main focus right now is North America because in some other parts of the world, we are doing very, very well. In South America we are a market leader. We have 60% of market share in the most important market in this area, which is Brazil. We are number one also in Europe. We're very strong in India. We defined the future new geographies and we invested in China and Russia. We have an engine joint venture already running in Russia for diesel engines; the next step will be an assembly factory for combines. And we just opened two facilities in China. We have a portfolio of about 75 strategic initiatives that we are working on right now.
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