Moving thanks to brakes

Professors Paul Wheal and Corinne Berneman (ESC Saint-Etienne) show how Beringer has thrived by providing top-of-the-line brakes for racing motorcycles, racing cars and now light aircraft

The city of Saint-Etienne in central France is not unlike Manchester in England. It played a major role during France’s industrial revolution. And like Manchester it has suffered economically, as France, like the UK, has changed to a service-based economy. Gilbert Beringer’s company is grounded in Saint-Etienne’s industrial past and manages to thrive by being forward-looking.

As a young man, Beringer raced sidecar motorcycles. After graduating from a Saint-Etienne engineering school, he began designing wheels and front suspensions for motorcycle sidecar combinations in 1985. Always driven by the urge to better what he viewed as improvable engineering designs, he started building sidecars for top-level motorcycle manufacturers such as Italy's Ducati, Germany's BMW, and Japan's Honda.

Professors Paul Wheal and Corinne Berneman from ESC Saint-Etienne (ESCs, Ecoles supérieures de commerce, offer undergraduate and graduate business education) have studied the firm. They point out a key element of Beringer’s strategy that has been present from the outset: “Beringer’s strategy has always been to serve a limited market with high-tech, high quality products. They position themselves at the very top of the performance chain.”

As a sidecar racer, Gilbert Beringer gained knowledge by working with racing teams. In 1990 it was his company that outfitted the 1990 French sidecar champions; the following year, Beringer and his wife rode their equipment to the championship. But Professors Wheal and Berneman note that beside the passion for racing, there was also business acumen: “Beringer is always keeping an eye open. The company is on the lookout for new segments on which they can bring their technical imagination and quality to bear. In the 90s they realized that sidecars were not a growing market and having noticed that there were few high-performance brake manufacturers, they decided to move into this segment.”

By 1993 Beringer was clean out of the sidecar business and, instead, totally in brakes. The firm achieved technical superiority by perfecting cast iron disks that had 40% more braking power and required less pad pressure than the standard stainless steel ones. By the late 90s, ever on the lookout for new markets, the firm began getting into racing cars, including providing brake callipers for Formula 1 machines. But it kept one big racing boot in motorcycles and even equipped the World Supermoto vice-champions in 2002 and 2004, the European Supermoto champions in 2003 and 2004.

Based in Chatelneuf, some 40km northwest of Saint-Etienne, the operation is a lean one. 9 employees oversee a turnover of some €1.5 million. “Design is performed in-house. Production is outsourced, mostly to local manufacturers. The products are then assembled and inspected in-house,” Wheal and Berneman report. Yearly growth, apart from a blip in 2005, has been in the 10 to 20% range, and the profit margin runs to a healthy 9%. The company’s research efforts amount to nearly 10% of turnover and have resulted in ten patents over the last 15 years. Nearly all the production of this French firm is exported: 85% to be precise, with Japan (22%) and Italy (18%) representing the two leading markets.

Beringer is smaller than its competitors (e.g. Brembo Racing) but in its case, small has been beautiful. Smallness has meant greater reactivity. “Beringer is able to put into practice customer requests faster than the competition. Reactivity has been key to their success: reactivity to customer preferences and reactivity to technological evolution, particularly in the field of materials” note Wheal and Berneman. Top-of-the range performance goes hand in hand with top-of–the-range response to need.

Pricing is an interesting issue. Beringer’s products are acknowledged as superior in quality but have a reputation of being expensive. Actually a Beringer product is only about one-third more expensive than, say, a comparable Kawasaki braking system. A Beringer kit with two discs, two callipers and master cylinder will run just under €2000, while the comparable Kawasaki package (ZX6R) will go for just under €1500. The fact that the Beringer system sells well shows that their top-of-the-range products are at least not too expensive to be unaffordable.

What does the future hold for this small high-tech firm? Beringer started out in sidecars, moved into motorcycle brakes and is now beginning to apply its technical savvy to other segments. In the early 2000s, Gilbert Beringer found that he and friends at his flying club were dissatisfied with the brakes on their light aircraft and so Beringer has designed a new type of brake system for such aircraft (see box). But the sky is not the limit, there are also dirt roads. Since 2005, Beringer has been working on brakes for trial and mountain bikes in collaboration with the bike manufacturer Koxx.

In the end then, Beringer is a paradoxical brake manufacturer. It doesn’t brake for market curves, it accelerates through them!

Reference: ECCH 508-105-01; "Beringer Braking Systems"; Professors Paul Wheal and Corinne Berneman; ESC Saint-Etienne; 2008.

Published in August 2009