In a virtual press conference during Embedded World 2021 week, congatec CEO Jason Carlson described the company to be in a “financially strong” position, with 2021 being congatec’s strongest year “of all time”, and looking forward to “2021 being a very exciting year”.
“Our revenues in 2020 went slightly up from 2019 – we are financially very strong,” he said. “During the pandemic, we saw just as much activity – if not more, although the decision time was slower.”
The company’s sales in 2019 were $126m.
“2021 is very exciting time: we are investing in the future. This will be the strongest year ever for congatec. I am a strong believer in investing. As a company, if you can continue to invest during the tough times, then during uptimes you’ll do much better,” he said.
Carlson also confirmed that congatec continued to hire more staff, although not at the same pre-pandemic levels.
Since its launch in 2004, congatec has been privately owned, but late last year, a business deal saw its majority shares acquired by a private equity firm DBAG, who claims to invest in “well-positioned mid-sized companies with potential for growth”.
“This [deal] gives us the financial strength we need,” said Carlson. “Now we are looking at M&A opportunities.”
“It’s a bright future for us,” he added.
congatec then presented new products in its embedded solutions lineup, including the conga-TCV2, a low-power SMARC 2.1 COMs with NXP i.MX 8M Plus processor for industrial edge analytics, embedded vision and artificial intelligence (AI); a COM-HPC starter set for modular system designs; and a COM Express compact module based on AMD Ryzen Embedded V2000 processors.
“While the new AMD Ryzen Embedded V2000 processor enhancements can be utilised in actively-cooled systems with 54W TDP, we see a significant number of customers with fanless and passively-cooled systems operating at 15W TDP or even lower. The goal to operate under such tight constraints is to enable highly rugged, sealed systems for reliable 24/7 operation in harsh environments. In those applications performance per watt improvements is welcomed with open arms, and the Zen 2 x86 CPU and the AMD Radeon graphics cores offer extraordinary scores in this area,” said Martin Danzer, congatec Director of Product Management.
