international outlook: asia Suprema focuses on quality of growth Suprema, the South Korean biometrics and security provider, has been demonstrating strong growth throughout the 15 years of its existence. “We want to become a trend setter in IP based security solutions and biometrics within the next five years,” says Vice President Young S. Moon. By Henrik Söderlund Suprema was founded in 2000, publicly listed in 2008 and has had a CAGR (Compund Annual Growth Rate) of 26 per cent from 2008 to 2014. Last year, the company increased its turnover by 26 per cent to 65.5 million dollars, which was the best ever and its market capital increased to 357 million dollars. And the company is doing well. “Our profit is in the range of 20–25 per cent of the turnover”, says Young S. Moon. Suprema focuses on three product groups: access control, public ID solutions and embedded fingerprint modules. Access control is the major business and the proportion of sales is about 5-3-2. During last couple of years, Suprema has doubled the number of employees, from 100 to 200, mainly focusing on R&D to extend the company’s offerings further into integrated security platform. “The major challenge we face with growth is to maintain our ability to meet market needs quickly, and we are doing so by minimising the decision process to compete with start-ups as well as large corporations”, states Young S. Moon. Fingerprint boom Young S. Moon stresses that facial recognition and fingerprint recognition technologies compliment each other and he does not want to predict which one of the two might have the best opportunities in the future. “Fingerprints dominate the biometric market but we see a lot of potential in face recognition. It did take some time but about two years after we launched face recognition, we started to experience a lot of growth”, he says and continues: “They are similar in terms of the security level. What matters is user acceptance, which is based on the user experience. The advantage of facial recognition is that it is very natural. You do not need to do anything for recognition, just watch the device”. Boosted by smart phones There is no doubt that the introduction of fingerprint recognition in smart phones has increased the acceptance and knowledge about fingerprint readers. “Before, we had to spend a lot of time stressing the reliability and safety of our biometric products. We do not need to do that anymore”, explains Young S. Moon, who admits that on the other hand, people’s expectations of the recognition performance is higher now than before. “Yes, people experience how fast and easy it works on their phones and they expect the same from security products”. europe is key Suprema is targeting the midto-high end segment of the commercial security market. The company’s biggest market is Europe, which constitutes about 40 per cent of the revenues and then the Americas, the Middle East and Africa and Asia including the Pacific, constitute about 20 per cent each. “Our major growth can be attributed to our growth internationally. We currently have authorised distribution channels across 60 countries worldwide and our products are represented in more than 100 countries”, states Moon. “But there are still regions where we are in an early phase of business development. So, we have a lot more work to do and feel that there are a lot of opportunities for future growth”. “We want to become a trend setter in IP based security solutions and biometrics within the next five years,” says Vice President Young S. Moon. BRIC – strong growth Europe has been a key market for Suprema’s recent growth. Young S. Moon stresses that the European market appreciates the value of quality over price and is quick to adopt new technologies. But Suprema is also targeting the BRIC countries, which are now showing the biggest growth. Now wonder that Suprema is establishing offices in both China and Russia. Young S. Moon assures that the expansion will continue. Integration – the trend According to Young S. Moon, integration is currently the biggest trend on the market. There has been a lot of demand to incorporate Suprema biometrics technology in other systems in Europe. As a response, Suprema has released integrations with big players in security such as Axis, Genetec, Milestone and Paxton. He feels that the integration will add another dimension to the world class security solutions. It will offer benefits of biometrics such as convenience and security not just to the European market but across markets globally. Security-as-a-Service Suprema wants to create an ecosystem where integrators and installers can provide their own Security-as-a-Service based business. Young S. Moon believes that Security-as-a-Service is a natural result of a world with more cloud and mobile technologies. “Looking at the security industry, I do not think pure SaaS based services will be available in the near future, but providing added value like remote monitoring and control by SaaS makes sense for the time being”, states Young S. Moon. Biometric readers and IoT He believes that biometric readers for identification can be one of the most important and useful sensors within the Internet of Things, although IOT will come to the home automation market first. “If you know who is in then you can think of tons of different applications that can be automatically triggered. There is a huge potential there. Our readers are all IP based and they can easily be integrated with existing IoT devices, using our web based API”. Focused on organic growth Taking a glance at the future, Suprema has always focused on organic growth rather than acquisitions. Young S. Moon says that acquiring companies just in order to increase revenues is not interesting for Suprema. Acquisitions require companies that have people and/or technology that can help accelerate Suprema’s organic growth. “The quality of growth is more important than just the size of the revenue”, he concludes. Security News Every Day – www. securityworldhotel.com