Management Motivations: Sales and technology go hand-in-hand for creating business success

Management Motivations is a new series of articles by Quectel’s senior executives that explores their management styles, approaches to the challenges of further developing the company and what drives them to lead and succeed.

Michael Wallon, vice president of APAC and ANZ, Quectel

1. Sales and technology go hand-in-hand for creating business success

I’ve been lucky to work across all the areas that now form Quectel’s business. I started out in the telecoms industry and by 1987 I was in the mobile industry as head of two retail chains in Sweden. I then became sales director for a mobile operator in the early 1990s where I realized M2M was going to be a big thing in the future. These experiences led me to take the step of founding Unwire, an M2M specialist that was first to enable high accuracy positioning based on GSM networks, without GPS.

Unwire specialized in M2M related products and services with a focus on the industrial, payment and fleet market. Our patented positioning system was based on high-accuracy GSM-triangulation technology. It was sold and implemented at several mobile operators. The technology was combined with altitude data graphics, which meant it could ultimately achieve accuracy of 25 meters in the inner city and about 250 meters in the countryside. Our location-based services (LBS) system was the first to be sold to a mobile operator in Europe.

This was an extremely exciting journey to go on and we took the company from an initial investment of 17 million Swedish kronor (SEK), which was about US$1.7m, to a sale for around US$100m to Cellpoint Inc in February 2000. Growing the company from two people to 45 in three years was immensely rewarding and to see our technical ideas out in the market was satisfying.

Since then, I have stayed in M2M and IoT, joining the module vendor side of Siemens after selling Unwire. My role there was to build the company’s Nordic market and I stayed there until 2008 when there was a management buyout of the module business to form Cinterion. Following that deal I took over managing part of Europe (excluding DACH) and the CIS as vice president.

Cinterion was acquired by Gemalto in 2010 and in 2013 they asked me to lead the APAC division so I based myself in the region and extended my understanding of the different cultures involved. I’m always looking to learn new things and understand customers’ challenges so, having been in Europe for my career before this, it was a great opportunity.

By 2015 I had been working in the modules market since 2001 and I was open to a change. I had been working for Siemens, Cinterion and Gemalto for almost 15 years and the innovation there wasn’t as active anymore. The company slowed down because competition was coming and they didn’t have the resources to invest at the important parts of the operation so I left the module industry.

I returned to the mobile operator business, starting an MVNO in Hong Kong and later became sales director for another before I was approached by Quectel to take up my current role. Technology brings these fantastic opportunities so, when Quectel approached me, I realized quickly that this was a company where I could achieve what I had wanted to do with Cinterion and really grow the business with no upper limit. To me it is very clear that European and American module vendors are unable to provide the levels of support that customers need, and at the speed required. However, I understood quickly that Quectel does have this ability and these resources.

In Quectel, people are free to do their business, it’s fast, it’s friendly and it’s very innovative. We put the customer first and I love that.

Look out for my next blog in this series: “A business exchange is also a cultural exchange.”