Mr Baren, what is your background and what were the reasons for founding IPTE?
When I started my own company I was about 50 years old. I had worked at Philips for more than 25 years, on the professional (i.e. non-consumer) side of the electronics business. At that time Philips was no longer interested in the professional side and they sold all their activities. I’d always had a feeling that entrepreneurial issues were very important for me and so I decided to start my own company. I saw an opportunity to start the test automation business and in 1992 I started the company together with four colleagues and five additional persons. It was no management buy out, we just started in competition to Philips. In 1993 we had a turnover of 0.8 million euro, right in the middle of a European recession. But we were lucky in so far as in the following years from 1994 to 2000 we were able to double our revenues every year.
How has your company’s structure developed since that time?
In 1998 we made our first acquisitions. We took over PTS in Fürth, Germany, which was the former engineering department of Grundig. With PTS our automation business was running at about 35 to 40 million euro annually. In 1999 we bought the Belgian company Connect Systems, which is in contract manufacturing. Contract manufacturing is a completely different kind of activity. The idea was to balance out the automation activity. With automation you are in investment goods, in contract manufacturing you are in production of electronics. In an economic downturn consumer goods can dip 10 %, and in an upturn they can be up 10 % or 20 %. But with investment goods we are talking about 50 % down or 50 % up. So the cycle is much sharper. To balance that out, we decided to set up a contract manufacturing activity, what is much more stable. When we bought Connect Systems, it was running at about 20 million euro a year. In 2000 we had a total turnover for both activities of 108 million euro, little bit less in contract manufacturing, a little bit more in the automation side.
Things slowed down quite a bit after that, didn’t they?
This brought us to 2000, which was also the year we listed on the stock exchange. From 2001 to 2004 we had a quite severe recession. This made it difficult to remain profitable, and in fact we ran up a substantial loss. But we pulled through. And in the past two or three years, we again managed to increase our sales and move back into the black. Last year we were up to 138 million euro with a profit of close on 2 million net.
