Ryder’s 2025 in Review
By Eric Winkler, Chair.
Another growth year: not only in sales, but also in capabilities and capacity. It confirmed our strategic clarity within “Swiss precision – Asian drive”; focusing on excellence, and ignoring distractions. Our regular internal benchmarking against public-market competitors confirmed Ryder’s performance.
Trust in colleagues has been a major advantage: imperatives are responded to immediately and with combined strength. Ryder’s “Respect for people” culture means that past successes and failures are confronted without finger-pointing, and learning points are internalised. We learn together, and so we can decide together. A nice place to work.
A major influx of new talent gave us the opportunity and the need to revisit our VMV (Vision, Mission and Values) statement; our top management workshop worked well, generating new insights and fresh perspectives. This is something that we have regularly done, and 2025 reconfirmed once again the quality of the output of our first VMV workshop 20 years ago, and the stability of our values over the decades.
Geopolitics have been a major demand-shaping global factor in 2025, and Ryder’s new Vietnam plant worked exceptionally well to fulfil it; credit goes to both our Vietnamese and Chinese colleagues, who worked intelligently and harmoniously together to ISO-certify its quality and processes.
The geopolitical turbulence of 2025 has made all customers more cautious. An exchange rate swing is potentially ruinous for an importer, and that is the scale of the swings that we have seen between the US$, the Euro and the Chinese Yuan. Ryder has protected its customers from this risk by quoting in US$ or Euro at their request, using the sophistication of Hong Kong financial markets, its historic home, where its holding office is located.
It has been good to observe the growing inter-cultural skills of our customer-facing people. This is critical for rapid, efficient and trusting service. This is the result of attention, education and experience.
Manufacturing has run smoothly, thanks to East Asia’s deep and broad supply chain network, and to the hard and smart work of Ryder teams. In particular, the ability of a Chinese speaker to pick up the phone and talk to a supplier in the same language among 1.4 billion people is a massively resilient asset. Ryder’s Six Sigma performance has progressed vigorously over 2025, and we see further improvements in prospect. Automation is keeping costs in check and is raising productivity – and our rising Quality performance too, as attested by the constant flow of customer awards.
Engineering, long a strength, is extending its design skills.
- Audio has developed in digital signal processing, switching-mode power supplies and amplifier circuits, as well as in the arcane field of acoustics.
- In the RF (radio frequency) field, it extended its mastery of the signal controls and protocols needed for the Internet of Things.
- Design-for-manufacturing for PCBA design has benefitted from powerful analytical software tools.
- Plastic injection quality has risen as we installed advanced equipment like infra-red heated nozzles.
- Fast PCBA prototyping became a reality with the installation of a Swiss high-tech machine: it precision jets on the solder paste (with 004008 quality levels) and then places components, all in a single machine, with built-in QC cameras. Customers have been very excited about its performance, helping them speed their time to market and reduce design finalisation times.
Ryder’s IT system has proved robust in 2025, the year in which its Vietnam extension started operations. Worldwide, cybercrime has grown into a massive and skilled business: criminals launched 20,000 ransomware attacks, billions of other attacks and slid through lax companies’ defences to steal 400 million people’s personal data. Ryder’s robust pan-Asia IT design will provide a 5 hour recovery against a ransomware exploit or other hack. Ryder’s customers and suppliers have provided an impressively solid base though this half-decade, through the Covid years and into the geopolitical challenges of the mid-decade. We are grateful for them. It is our team’s ethics, values, energy, teamwork and skills that provide this superior level of service to our customers (and, as customers to our suppliers); we will continue to provide this team with special opportunities to learn and to develop in the growth year 2026 and onward.
