#1106 2000 · Kaeser Kompressoren · Industrial compressed air
Kaeser stopped selling compressors and started selling cubic metres of compressed air
the problem
A compressor sale rewards the seller for oversizing the machine, not for how efficiently a factory actually uses air
background
Compressed air is one of the most common utilities in a factory — running tools, actuators and process equipment — but industrial compressed-air systems are also notoriously inefficient, with a large share of installed capacity lost to leaks, oversizing and machines running at partial load, where compressors are least efficient. Selling a compressor does nothing to fix this: a manufacturer's sales incentive is to sell a bigger, more expensive unit, and once purchased, the customer owns and bears every cost of running it inefficiently for the next fifteen or twenty years.
A factory manager who suspects their compressed air system is wasteful has every reason to distrust a compressor salesman's advice on how to fix it, since the salesman profits from selling more capacity, not less.
what everyone would do
Compete on compressor price and efficiency ratings, offer maintenance contracts on top of the sale, or run an energy audit as a sales tool — the standard moves for an equipment maker trying to appear trustworthy about efficiency while still profiting from the sale.
what they saw
A machine sale rewards a bigger, less efficient system; a utility contract rewards Kaeser for a smaller one that wastes less power — selling the air, not the compressor, flips what Kaeser wants to build.
the move
Kaeser's SIGMA AIR UTILITY contracting model has the customer buy no compressor at all: Kaeser designs, installs, owns and operates the entire compressed-air station on the customer's site, and bills only for the compressed air actually delivered, metered in cubic metres, at a pre-agreed price. The equipment never appears on the customer's balance sheet as a capital asset, and Kaeser bears the full cost of running the system, which means Kaeser's own profit now depends on the plant running as efficiently as possible rather than on how much equipment it sold.
why it works
Once Kaeser owns the equipment and is paid only for air delivered, every inefficiency in the system becomes Kaeser's own cost rather than the customer's, so Kaeser's engineers are now motivated to right-size the compressors, fix leaks and optimize control systems — the same actions a customer-owned system's operator has comparatively little incentive to pursue on unfamiliar equipment. The customer, meanwhile, gets guaranteed air supply without ever having to become an expert in compressor engineering or carry the capital cost on its books.
the payoff
Sigma Air Utility now runs factory compressed-air systems worldwide on a pay-per-cubic-metre basis, off customers' balance sheets entirely.
where it breaks
It requires the seller to be able to meter output cheaply and reliably, and it only pays off if the seller's operating efficiency gains exceed what a motivated in-house team could achieve on owned equipment — for a customer with cheap in-house expertise and low-cost capital, owning the compressor outright can still be more efficient than paying a margin for someone else to run it.
what came after
The model is now cited across the servitization and product-service-systems literature as one of the clearest examples of a manufacturer converting a capital-equipment sale into a metered utility contract, a template other industrial-equipment makers have since copied for compressors, pumps and air handling.
references
- [1]Operator model: SIGMA AIR UTILITYKaeser Kompressoren, 2024kaeser.com
- [2]Boost efficiency and reduce costs: The power of compressed air as a serviceKaeser Compressors (Kaeser Talks Shop), 2023us.kaeser.com