21923 - SCTE Broadband Aug2023 COMPLETE v1 (1)

61 Vol. 45 No. 3 - September 2023 Issue from the industry Tell me about your acquisitions strategy. Does that also include buying up the competition? We buy companies we believe are solid, strong organisations that bring either an ancillary product or an adjacent market so that we can not only grow that business, but grow Amphenol as a whole through those businesses. Buying up the competition has been something we’ve done in the past, but it’s usually not the only reason. Cabelcon was a competitor in some respects to Amphenol, and it merges two vendors in one area together, eliminating the competition, but the purpose was to bring on a very strong engineering and product set to Amphenol. Cabelcon has been in business 40 years and has had an interesting history, culminating with this acquisition by ABS. What market needs does the company help Amphenol fulfill for its customers? AA: Cabelcon works in the coaxial area and we bring a European foothold. We have a good reputation, a strong brand, we build the best connectors in the world. We have strong engineering expertise and we also create solutions for other companies within the Amphenol family. You’re a global company now, but regionally everyone has their own way of working and their own history, their own culture. Working across big multinationals sometimes feels like you’re speaking another language, and sometimes you really are speaking another language. How are you finding it? DG: At Amphenol we don’t hand you the company uniform when we acquire you. Our strategy is to acquire what we believe are leading companies; our goal isn’t to make you look like us. Again, it’s a real benefit, but at times it can be a challenge too. Can you elaborate? DG: One of the things we first tell new acquisitions when they ask us, “Well what’s it going to be like tomorrow?” The answer is the same as it looked like today, because we’re not here to say, “Here’s your new blue shirt. Here: you are called Amphenol now. You can only use this type of computer.” It’s really status quo day one. The whole point is to basically leverage and build on that culture. We are north of a $12 billion global company. So what we want to bring you is economies of scale. The general manager, which is Amy’s role, is effectively the local President/CEO of that individual division. She has decision-making power and would continue to have that even after the acquisition. So yes, culturally there could be differences, but physically and operationally it stays the way it was. Amy, what are your thoughts? AA: I consider Cabelcon also a global company. We have been in different ownerships before and have been working globally for a number of years now. It’s a strength that we have the regional expertise and knowledge and foothold, but in my mind we’re a global company already. In terms of network emerging trends, what broadband and network trends do you see emerging over the next few years? DG: Speed and latency; everything going on in the broadband world circles around those two things. When everybody went to work from home for that period of time, we needed that level of bandwidth all day long. So I think we’re going to continue to drive towards that. If you think about autonomous vehicles for example, there’s going to need to be continued and uninterrupted speed everywhere. All the solutions you see out there are to support increased speeds, increased bandwidth and low latency. AA: There’s been an ongoing discussion for years now, being in the coaxial area, that fibre is taking over more from the coaxial area. What about 5G? A couple of years ago, it’s all people were talking about. It was going to be an absolute game changer and life would never be the same again. Has it changed everything? DG: There was a technological sell with 5G, which is a very strong value proposition to the customers, to the operators. It was probably a little muted as a rollout compared to the marketing for it, because it was a different type of build out. There are huge cell towers that are up on a pole, on a building, etc, that serve a much larger area right now. 5G concentrates on smaller function antennas, which have to be placed in more areas to be able to give this higher speed.