Interview Dyson CEO Max Conze: 'Our lifeblood is inventing. That is where we spend all of our money. The change to leading a company which has just broken through the £1bn turnover a year barrier, will put Conze in a spotlight of a different type - ensuring that Dyson's growth trajectory of 30pc expansion year-on-year continues. "It is quite a milestone because we have crossed the £1bn net-revenue mark for 2011," Conze says. It is an exciting moment and a high on which Martin leaves. It signifies how far we have come. In 2005, turnover at Dyson was £470m, creating an operating profit of £97m. In 2010, turnover was £887m and operating profit was £206m. If the same margins are maintained, profits could be expected to hit £230m for 2011, although Dyson will not be revealing that number until later in the year. "If you go a few years back we really were a one product company, albeit an iconic product, the cyclonic vacuum cleaner," Conze says. We are now much more a technology company. To vacuum cleaners, Dyson has added the Airblade hand dryer and the Air Multiplier range of fans and heaters. Its digital motor technology, which took 10 years to develop, means that its cordless vacuum cleaners are now smaller and more powerful, creating a new class of cleaning product, the Holy Grail of retail businesses. Expansion will come, Conze says, from developing markets in new territories and launching new products. More than 80pc of Dyson's business is now outside the UK. In Asia, Japan is very successful and is now our number two market [behind the US]. Beyond that we do have some presence but it is mostly small. We need to go to China and onward. Latin America is a big opportunity. Conze says that when he visited Florida he was struck by the number of holiday-makers from Latin America who would be loading up on Dyson products. Ever since 2002, when Dyson announced that it was moving its manufacturing to Malaysia from the UK there has been a nervousness about whether Dyson is wholly committed to maintaining a large part of its workforce in Britain. At present, 1,450 of Dyson's 3,600 global employees are based here. Conze says that, far from the UK being under any sort of threat, he wants to expand in Britain, building on McCourt's project to hire hundreds more engineers in the UK. Rather than worry about losing jobs, Conze lieutenants have a different concern - how can they create more room in the car park? Conze is well aware of the British heritage of Dyson and its heart-beat, the headquarters in Malmesbury, Wiltshire. In this his first interview on becoming CEO, he refers regularly to how much he loves it in the Cotswolds and that his family - he is married and has two daughters - enjoys horse-riding. "I love that we are running this iconic British engineering company out of the oldest borough in England," he says. We are very committed to Malmesbury - Dyson grew up there and I think we will always be there. Today we have 1,450 people on the site of which 700 are engineers. It was sad that we had to close our manufacturing operation but we now employ more people here than we have ever before - and at a higher qualification and higher skill level. Although he says it would be difficult to envisage bringing manufacturing back to the UK - the supplier base is located in Asia - Conze reveals that he expects to be employing 2,000 people in the UK over the next few years. "We put on 200 engineers in the UK last year," he says. In 2012 we are looking for about another 200. We will continue to aggressively bring in bright young engineering talent. Conze also wants to add to other parts of the business such as sales, finance, accounting and marketing. Fundamentally we think we can keep or accelerate the rate of growth we have. Dyson prides itself on its recruitment strategy, hiring graduates straight from university. Mark Zuckerberg once said that his biggest worry about Facebook's rapid growth was losing its start-up DNA and failing to innovate. Dyson, as it expands rapidly into a global player, faces similar issues. "P&G passionately believes in bringing in people young from university and not from other businesses to get the best and the brightest minds and then to train and develop them," he says. That is something we at Dyson - James [Sir James Dyson, the founder] and I - are very passionate about. That way you get the best and you get them before they are indoctrinated in the wrong way, where their minds are still open, when people are ready to take risks. They don't know what is wrong and that is good. They are not conventional and we do not want them to become conventional. Conze's experience in America and Japan - where many UK retail businesses have launched and foundered due to a lack of understanding of the market - holds lessons for many businesses looking to grow through exports. In America, differentiation is the key, Conze says. In a sea of mundane "white goods," Dyson has built itself as the sassy interloper, the brand that brings a bit of product magic to a sector that would not comfortably live with the epitaph "exciting." Best Buy and Target are not exactly Disneyland. Twelve white fridges isn't incredibly exciting. So, we can add a lot of value to the retailer by acting as a focal point and drawing traffic. Apple was built on a similar philosophy - we may not be the cheapest but, boy, are we the best and we look pretty good as well. In Japan, the breakthrough for Dyson came with the digital motor that allowed for compact machines better able to fit in smaller Japanese homes. The heating and fan products (which the business calls "environmental control") also fitted well in a country where homes are often heated one room at a time to conserve energy. Power supply has also been rationed following the 2011 earthquake, making efficient household appliances more attractive. As with any start-up business which grows to become a market leader, there have been bumps along the road. The most notable was the dual-drum washing machine, launched in 2000, which struggled under a weighty price tag of £1,000, when the average price of a washing machine was below £300. It was discontinued when sales volumes were not high-enough to justify the expensive production line. Speaking to McCourt, who became CEO after the product was launched, there is a clear opinion in Dyson that learning from mistakes is much smarter than pretending a company never makes any. Why wasn't it a commercial sucess? McCourt says. What it boiled down to is that it was an expensive consumer device. In our best year we sold 25,000. But the scale of through-put to sustain a manufacturing plant for a washing machine is considerably above that. So, net-net, every time we sold one we were losing money. I can't remember how much but I know it was too much. Losing money hurts. We hate that and we have become particularly good at avoiding that scenario. As McCourt says, failures have been rare and the greater problem has been meeting supply demand as the new Dyson products have hit the shelves. John Lewis has recently struggled to satisfy customer orders for the air multiplier. "When you bring [a product] to market you cannot pore over financial sales results and then extrapolate," McCourt says. You have to take a bit of a punt at it. We have been genuinely staggered on the take up of the air multiplier and the cordless vacuum cleaner and I'm absolutely certain we could have sold a great deal more. Being an "inventing business" brings other challenges, the protection of intellectual copyright being one of the most serious. In China there are a multitude of Dyson copycat products easily available. Sir James says that the British Government has been supportive on the issue and has sent an official to the British embassy in Beijing to be an expert troubleshooter. "Our lifeblood is inventing," Conze said. That is where we spend all of our money, that is where we take all of our entrepreneurial risk. When we invent things, we believe those things ought to be IP protected so that we have the ability to realise the fruits of that hard labour. It does make us angry that isn't always the case. We have been lobbying for IP protection to strengthen particularly in places like China, which happens to be the place where most of the infringements originate. We would love to be able to re-dedicate the energy we commit today - which is significant in terms of money and people - to go after everybody that is infringing us and put that energy into inventing machines. At a time when many companies complain of an "anti-business" tone to much of the debate in the UK, Dyson is seen by many as a ray of sunshine in an otherwise economically gloomy forecast. Expanding, hiring new people and moving into new markets, it is just the sort of business that David Cameron, and maybe even Ed Miliband, can applaud. "We are looking at expanding all areas of our business," Conze says. Which is not something that could be repeated by many UK CEOs in the first half of 2012. Max Conze: CV Age 42 Education: Bachelor of Business Administration, Columbus State University, Georgia, US Career: Procter and Gamble 1993-2010; Dyson 2010-12 Not a lot of people know... that Max was in the Germany army parachute regiment