ANDY STEVENS EPIC CEO INTERVIEW
instruments. But to grow the company we are starting to expand into higher volume, lower cost products – although I hate to say it, commodities. To do this, over the next 2-3 years we’re going to have to change quite a lot - setting ourselves up for higher volume manufacturing and effective supply chain management etc.
quickly got us a global reputation as a technology leader. But I think we stayed focusing on high performance, low volume R&D products for too long because with this model it’s hard to grow due to the lumpy cash flow and revenue. If I started again, I’d move into lower cost, higher volume products earlier to enable much faster growth.
What are your main growth markets?
IN
What’s your advice for the next generation of entrepreneurs?
IN
AS Primarily it’s photonic devices like transceivers for production testing and we are seeing a lot of growth around the AI market and all the devices associated with that. Through the acquisition of SmarTest we’re also expanding into electrical testing. For example, we’ve recently launched a sampling oscilloscope product, which is very competitive and we’re expecting to see this area grow very quickly, particularly RF electrical testing.
AS Get a good board of directors by choosing the directors extremely carefully. This will enable you to go to the next level because as a CEO you’re too close to the business and you need people with the right experience to look at things from the outside.
Andy Stevens, CEO Quantifi Photonics.
How do you see the AI market evolving?
IN
AS I think there’s going to be very significant market growth as there are some incredibly large investment funds being set up just to develop AI technologies and fabrication facilities, so it’s going to keep moving. With AI, the growth will be in relation to highly paralleled data transfer, and we are well positioned to benefit a lot from this market. The days of having one rack of test instruments only looking at one device at a time or one test channel at a time are going to fade away. In fact, some of our customers are looking at ways where they can test a thousand channels in parallel, and I think we’re at the start of a new era for photonics.
What have been your main personal challenges?
IN
AS Like with most other founding CEOs, the company got to a certain point where I couldn’t be involved in everything, and I had to take a step back and put a team in place I could trust. For me, it’s been a two-year process, and to a large extent, I now leave them to get on with the day to day running of the company, which has allowed me to focus on things like strategy. Nevertheless, it’s been a very challenging transition.
If you started again, what would you do differently?
IN
Our first product was a very high-end, world leading product mainly for R&D, which very
AS
www.opticalconnectionsnews.com
29
ISSUE 37 | Q2 2024
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator