AT the Stockholm base of Electrolux, the world’s biggest producer of household and garden appliances, they have a digital counter on prominent display. “Products sold by Electrolux this year” reads the blurb above the constantly changing numbers. It was ticking past 41,114, 947 when I walked in.

Hans Straberg, Electrolux’s youthful-looking boss, meets me by the Chinese fridges, part of a vast display of the company’s goods manufactured around the world.

Compact and thoughtful, with the preppy appearance of a lean Robert Kennedy, Straberg wastes no time in eulogising over the range, whisking open fridge doors and running me through the dimensions of various ovens.

He is, no surprise, as product-obsessed a business leader as you can find. Chief executive since 2002, born in Sweden but with a chunk of experience in America, he likes to keep his employees’ eyes on the prize.

And to stay at the top he is pushing the company, one of Europe’s biggest, through a radical transformation. Straberg, 48, a keen hunter, has been picking off the group’s “high-cost” factories one by one — 15 plants so far in western Europe and America — and shifting production to cheaper economies.

After 30 years in which Electrolux seemingly bought every firm it could find, and turned itself into a lumbering, brand-laden giant (AEG, Zanussi, Frigidaire, Westinghouse, Flymo), it is now slimming down.

Straberg wants fewer brands, more concentration on the Electrolux name and a leaner, more innovative, more consumer-centred organisation to emerge from it. “Then,” he says, “we will be on a level playing field with the competitors from emerging economies.”

The change has been barely noticed by consumers, and the cries from politicians and unions have been muted, too. Most understand Electrolux’s ruthless logic. Only by undergoing such a revolution can the group, which has sales of €13 billion (£8.8 billion), keep its No 1 position.

Rising material costs and fierce competition from Bosch, Indesit and Whirlpool are just the half of it. The Koreans and Chinese are flooding in as well. This is globalisation at the sharp end.

And the human cost of all these shutdowns? “It’s the last resort, it involves suffering for employees and we lose knowledge, skills and goodwill,” acknowledges Straberg, “but you have to do it when nothing else is left to do, otherwise someone else from Asia or Turkey will take the market.”

By now Straberg has walked me down to an underground “spark” room, a sticker-strewn bunker in Electrolux’s converted hospital base, where his designers work on ideas for new products. Pouring coffee, smiling readily, Straberg is rational charm personified.

When I ask him, having noticed a picture of a Dyson vacuum cleaner on the wall, if he would ever be interested in buying out his smaller British rival, he gives a toothsome grin. “Sure, I wouldn’t rule it out, but I don’t think he is for sale.”

Straberg, an engineer-turned-manager, is a smooth operator. He speaks fluent English, inflected with Scandinavian and dotted with American business phrases. He made his name overhauling Electrolux’s American operations in the 1990s, shutting plants and laying off thousands.