Heléne Mellquist joined Volvo Group in 1988. She has held several leadership positions in the group, which today includes Volvo Trucks, Volvo Buses, Volvo Construction Equipment and Volvo Autonomous Solutions, among several other sub-brands.
In 2012, she was appointed CEO of Volvo’s TransAtlantic AB, where she served for four years. Mellquist in 2016 assumed a role as senior vice president of Volvo Trucks International, and in 2019 was appointed senior vice president of Volvo Trucks Europe.
Mellquist assumed her current role as president of Volvo Penta, which includes Volvo Penta Marine Leisure, Volvo Penta Marine Commercial and Volvo Penta Industrial, in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic in July 2020. She replaced Björn Ingemanson, who retired in September 2020.
She has faced many challenges in her tenure to date, including supply-chain woes, chip shortages, labor and training struggles, high inflation, and an energy crisis and other headwinds generated by the Russian invasion and subsequent war in Ukraine.
Soundings Trade Only connected with Mellquist late last year to learn how she has been meeting these challenges, as well as to get a look into her vision for the company as a whole. This interview has been lightly edited for space and clarity.
Where did you grow up? Were you a boater as a child?
Oh, all of that. I normally present myself as a Swedish West Coast package. I can’t hide that I’m Swedish. I mean, I love my family, so I spend a lot of time there. I also love boating, because that’s what you do here. I also come from the forest. My father and mother ran a tree farm, so I was born in the countryside, and then I moved to Gothenburg with its fantastic seaside. I also met my husband, who loves the sea, there.
So we spend a lot of time boating. We have a couple of powerboats, but we also have a J/80 sailboat that we have for fun. We really love sailing, but we like powerboating as well, and we have a Zodiac, which I use to go to the grocery store in the village. Instead of taking the car, which is boring and difficult to find a parking space for, I can always find a dock in the harbor. I also like skiing in the winter, so I’ve been skiing in Aspen a couple of days now during the holidays.
Your educational background focuses on economics, international business studies and executive management. How do you leverage that with the position you’re in now, and when you were at the larger Volvo Group?
I must say that learning is something lifelong, but I still leverage that education. Volvo Penta is an international, global business, so it’s a thrill to be in this business. I really am passionate about how you actually maneuver and steer a company. What I’m really passionate about is combining the team, really good business and then also having good leadership and working with that all together. Providing customer value is also my passion, and I think that my training has actually formed me in that way as well.
You’ve been with Volvo Penta since 2020, but you’ve worked inside the larger company, Volvo Group, since 1988. What experiences and skills have you taken from the larger group into your day-to-day position with Volvo Penta?
I think there are a lot of things that I bring with me from that time, but I think one notable area that’s translatable is the sustainability side and transitioning the Volvo Penta business into a new era. We are rebuilding a company that started in the automotive industry. I started in the truck side of the business, where we made big plans that are still ongoing. So this move toward sustainability is a big part of what I bring along from that experience.
It feels as if things have gotten better when it comes to the supply chain, inflation and fuel prices. Can you speak to those headwinds and tell us what you are doing to streamline things you can control?
I think we are doing everything we can because this has really been an unprecedented time. Like you mentioned, the supply-chain crisis came with the pandemic, and now we also have the war in Ukraine. After spending some time in the U.S., I see that Americans do not really feel what we feel here in Europe. It’s not over when it comes to the energy crisis or inflation over here.
So we have had a really clear set of priorities the entire time. We said that the health and safety of our people, and those in our ecosystem, is our first priority. The second is to deliver to our customers and get them what they need as quick as possible. I know that we have not lived up to this, but I must say thank you to the entire team that we have here, and also the entire supply chain, including our suppliers. We have all been fighting with this now for almost two years, and we’ve been continuing into 2023. We have invested in new shifts and are working around the clock. We have also increased our capacity in order to take up the swings. I must say that we have done our utmost, and I think that everyone else in the industry has had the same type of problems, to be honest. I would like to emphasize that we’ve done a lot of things, and it’s still not over.
Volvo Penta has not always been known for mergers and acquisitions, though there have been a couple of big ones in the past several years. Is scouting those types of transactions something where Volvo Penta invests a lot of time? Or is it something that’s more opportunity-based?
I think the collaboration partnership is the new leadership. Volvo Penta has another tradition: We have bought companies like Humphree and CPAC to accelerate the sustainability transformation at our company, and we also bought a battery company in Norway called ZEM. We also entered into a collaboration with Danfoss Editron to make a really good package on the marine commercial side with electro-mobility. Recently, Volvo Penta introduced CMB.Tech’s technology, where we have a combustion engine that is dual-fuel that you can use with hydrogen or diesel. I think we will continue to do these things, and we are continuing to scout through different themes that we are interested in, or as a way to accelerate our own transformation.
We try to balance why we should do something ourselves, or when we should look for a partner. One thing that we did lately was to attend CES in Las Vegas. I think that is an opportunity to look into areas where we are not normally scouting, but where we can meet with other parties and see what customer experiences look like in the future. So yes, this is on our radar, definitely.
There is a lot of buzz around hydrogen and ammonia fuels as sustainable alternatives to diesel. What’s your view on sustainable fuels and hybridization?
We are working in three different work streams and base technologies that I’m quite proud we’ve been able to invest in. The first one is electro-mobility with battery solutions. This is where you see the hybridization. I think the toughest part is in boating applications, because when we are driving the boat, it is like driving a truck uphill all the time. So that is why we predominantly use the hybrid solutions. But we also look at fully electric solutions and ask ourselves if this is maybe where we see boating in the future. Do you always go 20, 30, 40, 50 knots? Or is it that you can go 10 knots and then go much farther?
There’s no silver bullet in this. It’s only certain depending on the application, and the different persons and companies that use these technologies. That’s the battery part. Then you come into fuel cells, where we have our collaboration with cellcentric. I think that will come a bit later because the technology is not mature on the marine side yet, and there’s so much that needs to be secured technically before we can let it out on the market.
Then we have the third one, which is the combustion engine. I think we all thought a couple of years ago that the combustion engine was dead, but I now am certain that it is not. It is very much alive, but we can now consider using the alternative fuels. If we talk HVO (hydro-treated vegetable oils), it is possible to use that in all post-2016 Volvo Penta engines. This fuel lowers emissions by 90 percent, which I think is quite substantial. Then you have hydrogen gas, which needs to be done as green as possible, as well. You also have methanol, for example, and ammonia. So, we are looking into all those also. We are developing our combustion engines continuously. Some think that we are not putting money into that, but yes, we are.
What is the work culture like at Volvo Penta? What are you doing to retain employees and keep them happy?
Our first priority has always been health and safety. Also, our culture at Volvo Penta is different than the culture of Volvo Group. What that means is we are seen as an entrepreneurial, very innovative and passionate and close to our customers. We are also working with inclusiveness — not only the diversity of our teams, but also inclusiveness to use the best parts of all employees with new competencies, gender balance and geographical balance, but also finding the right mixes for our teams. The other thing that we are investing in is developing a learning company to grow our employees’ mindsets, so they have the tools to win at work. We also have different types of competence developments that we are making all over that require a lot with training and change. But of course, we’re also taking in new people, but also upscaling and rescaling people that we have.
We used to think that we could not fully utilize our longtime engineers. I think they’re brilliant because they know our business — they are the foundation. By adding in the diversity that I talked about and new competencies in our employees, this will grow the entire organization.
Acquisition is important in this, as well. Grow to win is one other theme. And the last one is the courage to change. That’s because you must take on the challenges we have right now. It demands a bit of courage to do new things because we are quite successful already.
Are you working on any initiatives in workforce development and labor training, in Europe and worldwide?
We are enhancing our efforts in those areas because we recognize the challenges. Our 3,500 dealers all over the world are a fantastic asset for us, so we need to make sure these jobs are as attractive as possible because these technicians are so important for us and the customer experience. They are the ones that make our customers happy, and using our products so enjoyable. I think we have these areas in focus and are working with dealers to ensure proper training and competence requirements. We also have a tool which is called Vista, a sort of Olympics for technicians.
Vista is a true competence thing because technicians are using their knowledge of the Volvo product. There is a lot of studying. We start locally in a certain region, then in the country, a continent and then you have the world final, which is somewhere in the world, though most often it has been in Gothenburg. They come with their flags and lots of applause, and then they compete for a week. It’s fantastic. So there are strategies like this that we think in the future will benefit the group. Our technicians are of the utmost importance for us and for the customer experience.
There is a lot of news in the autonomy space, especially with Avikus, Raymarine, Garmin and others, including Volvo Penta. How important do you think this technology is going to be?
We see this as one of the crucial features in the future because I think it will help us grow a target group of boaters who want boating to be easier and less intimidating. I think autonomous boats would be a very good facilitator and a good support to get these people into boating or help keep them in it.
I also think it’s very good support for the old salts — the ones who are very senior at sea that have been out there and have their sea legs. It’s a bit like being a pilot in a plane, as well. You need to know the real thing, but at the same time, it takes down the stress level, and it’s also easy for you to make the right decisions. So I think it’s both on the commercial side we see good usage of this, but also to enlarge the target group. For me, it’s an important feature.
What are you most excited about at Volvo Penta in the next year or two?
My passion is the whole transition that we are doing to create the world that we and our children would like to live in. I think to get into that stage together with our fantastic team and our entire ecosystem, our customers and our suppliers, is exciting. To make that happen and to be successful in that, that’s really what gets me going every day. I think about it every day.
This article was originally published in the April 2023 issue.
