Advantech held their first ever global press conference yesterday at their World Partner Conference. Dora Chang, Advantech's CFO, Jeff Chen, CTO, and Ming-chin Wu, President of Advantech IAG, and KC Liu, Advantech's CEO attended and presented and answered questions.
Dora Chang presented a financial overview of an excellently funded company with a half-billion dollars in revenue, with 3000 employees and no debt. 21% year over year growth was shown, with 21% of revenues coming from Industrial Automation, and 34% coming from Industrial and Network Computing. 29% of revenue comes from North America. Their new emphasis on "eServices" has already reached 17% of revenue. Chang indicated that they would use their "cash cow" Industrial Automation Group to fund the move into other markets: telecom, medical, gaming, real estate intelligence (what the rest of us call the combination of Building Automation and Home Automation), and digital signage.
Editor's Note: That works out to more than $30 million in automation revenues from North America, which puts Advantech clearly into the Control Top 50, both for North America and globally.
Jeff Chen talked about the move from "application ready" to "service ready" product development. As KC Liu said in his speech earlier, the model is the move from MP3 to the iPod.
Ming-chin Wu discussed the status of the core Industrial Automation Group. He noted that the market for PLCs is growing at a relatively slow 7+% per annum rate, but noted that the growth of networked PACs is far higher than the average for generic and traditional PLCs...and that there is a growth opportunity for Advantech there.
Ming-chin described the trends he sees as important to the Industrial Automation Group. They included:
- integrated control, security, safety and information
- ethernet-- Industrial ethernet is now the dominant networking protocol
- WWW standards
- advanced control system architectures