From automotive to telemedicine and even turtles. Objects, but also animals, speak via the Internet and the incredible boom of the "machine to machine" sends Telit flying: born Italian, gone global, rewarded with a leap of 176,49% in twelve months on the London Stock Exchange. In figures: from 80 pence to £2,10, almost triple that. Chicco Testa, managing director of the group's Italian subsidiary, explains a First online the business at the origin of the success of this company which has distant roots and for four years, regardless of the global crisis, has been showing double-digit growth rates. “We make telephone sets. Modules - he says - that allow different categories of objects to communicate useful data: their position if they are moving vehicles, the value of an economic transaction in the case of POS used to pay in shops, electricity consumption in the case of smart meters or information about an accident through the black box installed on the car. The internet of things is a rapidly growing phenomenon all over the world, investors know it and the Stock Exchange rewards the title”.
History. Perhaps someone remembers the attempted marriage, in the mid-80s, between IRI's Italtel and Fiat's Telettra. The joint venture between the two groups was to be called Telit and was born from a right intuition, that of combining the production of telecommunications equipment with the nascent automotive supply chain, but it failed spectacularly over a question of seats after a tough tug of war between Fiat by Cesare Romiti and the Psi by Bettino Craxi. Issues of the last century. This Telit is something else. It starts in the mid-80s from Trieste Telital. After the acquisition by the Israeli fund Polar Investments and the management buyout by CEO Oozi Cats, Chicco Testa himself and a pool of investors, the company changed its business model and set course for M2M. We are in 2005 and since then the growth has exploded: from 700 modules produced in 2007 to 13 million last year and the aim is to double it in 2016. The adjusted EBITDA goes from 2,5 to 26,9 million dollars, revenues from 37,8 to 243,5 million. Today the EMEA area is the one that contributes the most to revenues but Europe has given way to the Americas, while Asia-Pacific accounts for 11,5%.
World-Italy. “We are a multinational – continues Testa – with strong Italian roots and a total of 650 employees, of which 200 between Trieste and Cagliari. We carry out research and development with ever new productions and tailored for the specific use of the single customer. We think we are the first in the world for market shares in a sector from which the large groups have preferred to leave: Siemens sold, Ericsson did the same, we bought Motorola's M2M division. From this specialization process, three world players have established themselves: Telit is the only pure player”, followed by Sierra Wireless and Gemalto. The production is all outsourced, the brains remain here, mostly engineers.
Turtles and nets. To make the machines communicate, Telit operates on Gsm/Gprs, Umts/Hspa, and Lte 3 and 4 G mobile networks or even via satellite. “The most important sectors for M2M are the automotive sector, remote payments, electronic meters that transmit data along the electricity grid and then, from there, up to the data center, on the mobile network; and then all the remote controls, home automation and telemedicine”. Telit's portfolio includes customers such as Magneti Marelli, Elster in telemetering, Garmin for automotive telematics (with the forecast of 1 billion cars connected in M2M in 2050), Tyco in security. The applications are many: from the control of company fleets to the data transmitted by surveillance cameras. But Telit modules have also been used for monitoring wildlife during the hatching period of sea turtles in North Carolina. And to help patients suffering from chronic diseases to take their therapies correctly: SimpleMed, an automatic dispenser developed with the Israeli Vaica, warns hospital doctors when the patient forgets to take the pill at home.
