Tobacco Asia Profile: The Total KARDIEN Solution

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A relative newcomer, Korean company KARDIEN, a subsidiary of KT&G, has nevertheless already made promising inroads in providing a broad range of easy-to-use yet very reliable tobacco product testing equipment.

By Thomas Schmid

Testing machinery breakdowns are a nightmare for any tobacco manufacturer, particularly if these problems cannot be fixed immediately. It can mean considerable quality control outages and also seriously affects costs. In the past, issues like that were frequently faced by Korea Tomorrow & Global Corporation (KT&G, formerly Korea Tobacco & Ginseng Corp.), South Korea’s leading tobacco firm and the world’s fifth largest in terms of revenues. The recurring problems eventually prompted the company to establish its very own testing machinery subsidiary, KARDIEN, in 2013.

Breaking into the Business

Having such a sister company at its fingertips helped KT&G to shell out its products without any further major hitches, but the tobacco giant soon of course also realized the potential for breaking into the international tobacco machinery business itself. The KARDIEN brand today stands for innovative technology as much as for reliable quality and seamless customer service in the area of testing and quality control equipment in an online production or offline lab setting. “As a subsidiary of KT&G, we at KARDIEN have from the very beginning upheld the long-standing principles of top quality and unparalleled customer service that have become synonymous with the mother company,” asserts KARDIEN’s sales director, Keun-Young Lee.

Rapid Portfolio Built-Up

Although having been founded only three years ago, the company already has built an impressive portfolio of both proprietary and adapted testing machinery [see side box]. “The very first machine that we launched was the KARDIEN test-station (Kardien-TS), which was adapted from existing technology for checking the physical properties of cigarette or filters, such as weight, diameter, pressure drop, ventilation, length, hardness, and related parameters,” recalls Lee. In rather quick succession further specialized machines followed. They were either entirely developed by KARDIEN itself or adapted and further improved in terms of performance, reliability, ease of use and maintenance, and, most importantly, exclusive software.

ALSO: KARDIEN’s Proprietary Vs Adapted Machinery Models

“For better understanding, all our products – including the adapted machines – are heavily based on software systems that we designed and developed ourselves. That effectively means that there generally are fewer hardware parts when compared to equipment from other manufacturers. This ultimately is what makes our models less prone to malfunctions or breakdowns and lets them run with very little, if any, maintenance,” Lee explains.

Business Expansion Drive

With occasional equipment failures at KT&G apparently having been sorted for good, the mother company soon decided that it was time for KARDIEN to also start marketing its sophisticated testing and measuring equipment portfolio in other countries. The company has since showcased its products at several international trade exhibitions.

Lee explicitly insists that his company does not limit its marketing activities to only a few restricted markets, but eventually wants to see its equipment being deployed globally.  “While it is still a bit too early after our launch to claim a resounding success in terms of global presence, we surely are making good progress,” he says and readily identifies China as one of the company’s current key markets. “Particularly China’s tobacco market is rapidly changing as domestic manufacturers move to super-slim cigarettes and capsule-filter cigarettes, consumer demand for which is increasing at a very fast pace.” This reflects a development that already has taken place in KARDIEN’s home base of South Korea, where both super-slim and capsule-filter cigarettes have become enormously popular among smokers.

But according to Lee, Indonesia’s cigarette market likewise is growing and expanding fast especially in the white cigarette segment, gradually veering off traditional kretek (clove) cigarettes. In order to accommodate these important market changes, manufacturers in China and Indonesia need sophisticated testing and quality control equipment, with Lee obviously hoping that they will choose KARDIEN products. Another focus for the company is Europe, where similar shifts are underway across the continent.

A Most Diversified Product Catalogue

Practically from the start, KARDIEN-TS – the very first product launched back in 2013 – became the company’s bestseller and remains so to this day. Lee sees particularly this machine as a kind of “catalyst” to drive future sales of other KARDIEN equipment as impressed clients develop brand satisfaction and loyalty. “Once a customer has purchased and used [KARDIEN test-station] they tend to stick with our brand. For us that means they are satisfied with our products because they provide superior analytical data accuracy at an affordable price.”

Furthermore, he stresses, clients like the ease of operation that is a hallmark of all KARDIEN machines and appreciate that no equipment failure problems occur, “even though we routinely provide thorough equipment maintenance and upgrading services every six months, regardless whether there are issues or not.” But the KARDIEN-fireball drop out tester (KARDIEN-FDOT) – a machine entirely developed in-house – has also proven to be a hot seller – and for very good reasons: “KARDIEN-FDOT currently is so far the only equipment able to detect and measure the fireball drop-out phenomenon. It’s a truly innovative, high-performance technological marvel.” But besides KARDIEN-TS and KARDIEN-FDOT, the firm’s expansive equipment catalogue of course also comprises filter and rod, paper and film, combustion-related, capsule-related, and other testing equipment, including smoking machines and moisture meters. 

Focus On Value-Added Services

But developing groundbreaking machinery alone is not enough to “make it” and survive in an extremely competitive market environment, an aspect which KARDIEN certainly has taken into careful consideration. The company puts tremendous emphasis on providing what Lee terms the company’s “quality measurement system total solution”; in other words, a seamless integration of state-of-the-art testing equipment and a slew of value-added services. Apart from the already mentioned half-yearly routine system maintenance and upgrading, the KT&G subsidiary also offers prompt internet remote control service in the rare case when repairs do become necessary.

And it almost goes without saying that the company installs newly purchased machinery at the respective client’s facility free of charge, with the crucial software system provided in the customer’s preferred language. Additionally, customers can send engineers or operating teams to KARDIEN’s servicing training center in Daejeon. Recently, the company also inaugurated a direct service center in Beijing, China, and according to Lee has plans to establish further such centers around Southeast Asia and in Turkey, but also in other countries as the need arises and “depending on how our sales grow there”.

Future Outlook

While KARDIEN currently has fewer than 30 employees on its payroll (Lee: “All of them are highly skilled in the tobacco machinery field.”), the company has access to a large pool of further professionals thanks to the broad range of tobacco-related affiliates within the KT&G group of companies. Although the firm maintains several manufacturing bases around Korea and in theory would be able to also assemble and market other tobacco-processing machines apart from measuring and testing equipment, such an expansion – at least for the time being – is not an immediate priority for Lee.

“The biggest challenge for KARDIEN at the moment is to fulfill our customers’ needs in providing simple-to-use and extraordinarily reliable testing equipment to keep abreast with ever so rapidly changing market conditions and trends. That is our prime focus, and that’s where our vocation lies. While we definitely have the capacity to expand into other machinery sectors, it is a matter that will need to be considered in the future and also depends on the support we receive from tobacco manufacturing industries worldwide.”