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Jason Cohenour, CEO, Sierra Wireless Inc. | BCBusinessSierra Wireless CEO Jason Cohenour learned early that high-tech companies need to reboot their products to stay current.
Jason Cohenour, CEO of Sierra Wireless Inc., discusses the necessity for evolution in a high-tech world. Anyone who had a home computer in the late 1990s and early 2000s probably remembers plugging a Sierra Wireless card into their PC. It was the era of the Internet; wireless connectivity was cutting-edge technology, and the Richmond company’s credit-card-sized AirCard linking home computers to the Internet was ubiquitous.
Anyone who had a home computer in the late 1990s and early 2000s probably remembers plugging a Sierra Wireless card into their PC. It was the era of the Internet; wireless connectivity was cutting-edge technology, and the Richmond company’s credit-card-sized AirCard linking home computers to the Internet was ubiquitous.
But by the time the PC cards were flying off shelves at Future Shop, engineers at Sierra Wireless R&D labs around the globe already knew the technology would soon be yesterday’s news. Reinvention is in the DNA of any high-tech company, particularly when your specialty is in the fast-evolving world of mobile wireless hardware.
“It hasn’t been a perfect straight line,” says president and CEO Jason Cohenour of the company’s growth from $6 million in revenue in 1996, when he joined as vice-president of sales, to the $571.8 million it recorded last year.
In an industry where burnout and executive turnover are the rule, Cohenour is the exception. He has ridden one reinvention after another as the company constantly innovates to stay one step ahead of evolving technologies and consumer demand.
Cohenour explains that the late-2000s were a time for reassessment at Sierra Wireless. Inexpensive Chinese products were flooding the market and consumers were migrating en masse from wireless laptops to tablets and smart phones. “We knew we had to aggressively diversify,” he says.
The first step was the purchase, in 2007, of AirLink Communications, a Silicon Valley company specializing in making tiny devices – embedded in everything from smart meters to cars – that transfer data to a remote server. The diversification would be solidified with the 2009 purchase of Wavecom, a French company also specializing in machine-to-machine communication hardware.
Meanwhile, Sierra Wireless’s core mobile technology needed a refresh to meet evolving consumer expectations. The AirCard linking home computers to the Internet would be replaced by the “mobile hotspot,” a battery-operated device that would connect multiple mobile devices to the 4G cellular network.
Last year was a year of retrenchment; Sierra Wireless lost a couple of major customers and was late in rolling out its next generation of wireless mobile technology. First came news that Barnes & Noble Inc. would drop the Sierra Wireless chip from its Nook e-readers. Then Clearwire, a U.S. marketer of home wireless networks, “had a change of strategy that, at the end of the day, didn’t include us,” Cohenour explains. The second hit came when Sierra Wireless was late in rolling out its mobile hotspot. Sierra Wireless posted disappointing year-end numbers, with revenue of $571.8 million, down 14.6 per cent from 2010, and a loss of $29 million, almost double the loss recorded in 2010.
As 2011 drew to a close, however, both machine-to-machine technology and wireless hotspot devices began to gain traction, and by the first quarter of 2012 Sierra Wireless was back in the black, recording a profit of US$345,000 on sales of $US150.3 million.
And Cohenour is already looking ahead to the next big thing: uniting the company’s wireless mobile and machine-to-machine technologies through cloud computing. And, as always, there is no guarantee of success. “You not only have to be right,” Cohenour says; “You have to be right at the right time.”