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TWST: What is Wi-Tron?
Mr. Nordgaard: Wi-Tron is a company with 10 years of experience
developing high-tech amplifiers. We have patented technology and we have
a world-class team of engineers who have helped create a number of major
breakthroughs in amplification. The company did suffer some business
problems during the dot-com bubble, and we are now in the process of
rebuilding and reconstituting the company. I have been brought on as
CEO. We have a CTO coming on very shortly who is very well respected and
very well known for his work around the world in the area of high-tech
amplification. We have a number of customers that we've served over the
years. Notably, we have been a supplier to Lucent over the years. We
have also supplied to militaries around the world. So we have built up
volume and we are working very hard to reestablish our relationships
with our customers and build a base of new customers. So it's a very
exciting time for the company. There are a lot of challenges ahead, but
we are addressing them in a very systematic fashion to build the company
up and make it a world-class competitor. In the area of high-tech
amplification, the market is largely dominated by two companies ' Andrew
and PowerWave. It's come to the attention of vendors and operators alike
that this duopoly and the pricing power that they have over the market
is creating problems and concerns for them. We've met with a number of
top operators that have expressed that to us, as well as vendors that
are clearly out shopping for a third-place contender to those companies,
particularly with the advent of new technologies that are coming on the
marketplace. The thing that's interesting about these new technologies
that has excited my interest in being part of this team and helping to
drive this effort is the fact that amplification to date has been very
inefficient in its consumption of power. With all the brownouts from the
heat wave that we were in, people are starting to understand the issue
of power consumption. With the proliferation of base stations around the
world that virtually cover a good portion of the surface of the planet
right now ' at least the populated surface ' all those base stations put
out an RF signal that is generated by amplifiers that are grossly
inefficient in terms of their consumption of power. The exciting thing
that's going on right now is that the advent of increasingly advanced,
digital signal processors and FPGA processors allows the engineer to
control the internal workings of the amplifier to reduce the energy
consumed in the process of amplification. There's an important dimension
of these new advances that really excites me because in the past history
of amplifiers, it was very easy for competitors to copy your designs.
This has happened and was one of the problems that was confronted by Wi-
Tron in its past. With this new generation of amplifier technology, more
and more of the advancements in the industry will occur in software with
the execution of very complex algorithms that will be virtually
impossible to extract off the chips. It's our plan to ship the chips
separately from the US to low-cost manufacturing partners in Asia. So,
with that as a model, we feel we can protect our intellectual property
and make advancements that will increase the overall efficiency to the
point where there will be significant savings, both operational and from
a cap ex standpoint for operators. The reason I say cap ex is because,
with the advancement in amplifiers, the other important step that is
being addressed with improved processing power that is becoming
available is that the amplifiers can cleanly amplify over a wider
bandwidth, so more data and more voice traffic can be handled by one
amplifier, as opposed to many. Of course, that reduces the number of
amplifiers that will be sold worldwide, but the value of those
amplifiers is much higher for the operator, and the value is there in
terms of the technological advancements that are in them. Those
advancements create a significant barrier to entry. So we have been
carefully picking and working with some of the top scientists and
engineers, both in the research community as well as in the development
community, to make sure that we assemble a team that has a proven track
record of moving these advancements to market. In fact, two members of
our team are the prime drivers behind two of the most advanced amplifier
designs used in the world today. Our ability to attract this kind of
talent is testament to the respect our CTO has in the industry. It's an
exciting time in the industry because the breakthroughs that are going
to occur over the next 12 to 24 months will significantly change the
amplifier market landscape and will drive cost out of the operation of
the wireless networks around the world. Opportunities in wireless
continue to grow. We have the FCC coming up with an option in the next
couple of months for the 2,100-megahertz spectrum. Further down the
road, the analog TV spectrum will become available. With all of these
cases, both in the United States and around the world, you have the
opportunities to build out vast, continental-size networks that require
literally tens of thousands of amplifiers. These are high value, high
dollar devices, so the opportunities are significant. In the global
arena, China is still in the process of rolling out or planning for
their 3G networks. All the best minds that monitor China clearly focus
on the fact that China is going to have the Beijing Olympics in 2008. So
China has just embarked on a process of modernizing and advancing their
network infrastructure, and in the process, opportunities are opening up
to work with the vendors, who will be putting those networks into the
Chinese market. We have struck up a relationship with some very
influenced businessmen in China, and we are in the process of looking to
get low-cost, outsourced manufacturing in China to help support some of
the opportunities that we have in front of us. One of the proactive
exercises that I have been going through is that we have some close
relationships that we are building with customers, and I am actually
helping those customers gain access to markets that they never had
access to before. The reason why I am doing that is because some of the
customers we have, in their own right, have created significant
advancements over the state of the art in the industries that they are
in. By introducing our customers to new customers, we are creating a
relationship that is very strategically timed. I have helped sell their
products and have opened up a number of potentially large opportunities
for them, and they, in turn, are interested in buying our products as
part of our strategic relationship. Obviously, we have to earn that '
there is work ahead. We are looking to build and supply them with what
they need, and that's a process we have embarked on. We have numerous
specifications that are being sent to us. We are trying to sort through
and figure out how to best utilize the resources of the company, and in
that process, we are going to be raising some funds over the next month
or two to help us bring on board the staff that we need to address these
various opportunities that are coming to us, as well as to perform the
R&D that's needed to make these advancements in the future of
amplification.
Tickers included in this excerpt: WTRO
For more information call (212) 952 7433. The
Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does
not make stock recommendations.
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