Danish Nimalift successful in selling Chinese machines

The Danish company Nimalift is successful in selling car lifts and tire machines that are produced in China. So successful in fact, that the company’s profit more than doubled in 2020.

Nimalift specializes in the sale of two-column car lifts, four-column car lifts, and scissor lifts and it is not only large customers such as VW, Ford, and Toyota that need car lifts, smaller car repair shops can not live without them and now private individuals have also increasingly started to install car lifts in their garages.

In an interview with Danish media JydskeVestkysten, the two owners Niklas Sørensen and Mads Brink, both 32 years old, talk about the company’s growth.

“We bought the first machines in 2009, but it was not until 2013 that we set up the company. Since then we ran it quietly, we may have done it a bit slower than others, but we have no debt, are self-financing, and are not dependent on the bank” says Niklas Sørensen.

Niklas Sørensen has a master’s degree in financial management and takes care of all the administrative work while Mads Brink is in charge of the sale.

For a while, the business was an uphill battle for the pair but things turned around in 2019 when they got in touch with a Chinese man who had worked at a factory that had gone bankrupt, and they went with him to a trade fair in Bologna. Together the pair have developed and have gone from being the best amongst the cheapest to now offering higher quality. That has allowed them to get their foot inside the door at some of the big factories in China and they also have a lot of small manufacturers who are willing to make something extra for them. That way they have been able to keep the price down while gaining more customers for car lifts and tire machines.

Niklas Sørensen explains that the accounts for the first quarter of this year look really good and the result is 30 percent higher than the same period last year, even though they were hit by rising iron and freight prices. The shipping price for container shipping has also increased and because they do not want to decrease the quality of their products, the additional cost has been added to the sales price. 

“We have a larger customer group, and we must constantly find new customers because our products have a long lifespan of 15-20 years. And there will be customers for new products such as ergonomic wheel lifts, battery lifts for electric cars, which we have sold to Ford, and we have also just sold motorcycle lifts to Kawasaki. So they are good customers for us,” Niklas Sørensen says.