1. As CEO and Global Sales Director at Pendulum Instruments, you’ve been instrumental in shaping the company's trajectory. What can you tell us about your background and how you got involved in the test and measurement industry?
I have had an entrepreneurial spirit since I was young. At some point in my career, I established a company in Poland for my employer. The venture proved successful and within three years, the company became a market leader. In 1998, when I was presented with the opportunity to acquire one of the smaller former Philips companies, I decided to start my own business. In those days it was an oversized R&D and production site without its own sales and marketing organization. With my business background mainly within sales and marketing, this turned out to be the right challenge for me. With some excellent R&D engineers and great product managers, we have successfully launched new products and integrated new technology into our own technology. It has been an exciting journey so far, and I look forward to seeing what the future brings.
2. The company's roots date back to the 1960s as the Philips timing and frequency competence center. In 1998, Pendulum Instruments was spun off from Philips. Could you provide some insights into the company’s heritage and evolution over the years?
Dutch Philips had a deliberately de-centralized structure after WW2. Before WW2, the activities were heavily centralized in the Netherlands, and everything fell into the hands of the Germans in the 1940s. Philips wanted to distribute the R&D and production centers all over Europe so that if one country should be invaded, the others could continue if ever there should be another European war.
The competence center in Stockholm, Sweden, was one of these distributed entities in the 1950s. This group was responsible for the R&D, production and global product marketing of instruments related to time and frequency from the early 1960s. The focused R&D group had a high degree of expertise, especially in the niche of frequency and time counters. During the 1970s and 80s Phillips was in the top three in the world for frequency counters, after HP. From the 1990s, Philips was the undisputed number two.
Philips T&M started a strategic alliance with Fluke in 1987, which ended in the acquisition of all sales channels and most of Philips’ T&M product competence centers by Fluke in 1993. The Swedish group remained owned by Philips but continued development and production for Fluke under an OEM agreement.
In 1998, the Philips division in Stockholm was spun off and got its new name, Pendulum Instruments I became the owner. Most of the R&D expertise followed the new company and continued to develop innovative products, for example, the GPS-89 in 2000, the industry's first fully traceable GPS frequency standard and the CNT-90 family in 2004, the industry's first graphical timer/counter/analyzer. Pendulum continued to have Fluke as an OEM partner after the spin-off and for a short time, partnered also with Wavetek Precision Instruments.
In 2000, Pendulum created its own sales organization, selling products under the Pendulum brand in parallel to the OEM channels. The company grew rapidly during the coming years and became a global company with distributors and reps in approximately 100 countries.
In 2004, Pendulum was recognized as the “Electronics Company of the Year” in Sweden by the leading magazine “Elektronik I Norden” and also got an honorable mention in the “Test & Measurement World’s” Best-in-Test award.
In 2007, production was outsourced to Altaria Services in Banino, Poland. In 2008, the company was acquired by French holding company Orolia and, in 2009, merged with U.S. sister company Spectracom. Pendulum’s R&D continued in Stockholm and Pendulum was the brand name of Spectracom’s T&M product line. In 2011, Spectracom closed the Stockholm office and transferred the Pendulum products to its French facility. Between 2011 and 2016, Spectracom continued the sales of Pendulum-branded T&M products. The products were maintained in France and are still continuously produced and serviced by Altaria Services in Poland.
In 2017, I bought back the Pendulum product line and the Altaria facility, with its long history of production, calibration and service, became the new headquarters. Altaria Services quickly changed its name to Pendulum Instruments and the era of “Pendulum 2.0” began. R&D personnel were recruited, and an R&D group was built up with old experts from “Pendulum 1.0” and new talents. The old distributor network from “Pendulum 1.0” was quickly restored and sales offices were established in China and the U.S., recruiting personnel from “Pendulum 1.0.” Thanks to the personal relationships with former key employees, this process was very fast.
3. Pendulum has a rich history of acquisitions and mergers. Can you describe how those activities helped the company reach its current position? What are your thoughts on organic growth versus acquisitions for the company moving forward?
We need to grow both organically and via acquisitions. To grow our time and frequency core business, we have relied on organic growth and strategic acquisitions. Our main acquisitions during the years have been:
XL Microwave Inc. in 2004, Rapco in 2008, FLC Electronics and Detectus AB in 2020. The acquisition of XL Microwave gave us knowledge about the microwave counter segment and led to the later development of the CNT-90XL family, the current number-one microwave counter on the market. The acquisition of Rapco improved our market knowledge of frequency and time references outside the metrology segment, our strongest niche since 2000 (Rapco's product line was transferred to Spectracom in 2008). The acquisition of FLC Electronics and Detectus broadened our portfolio and gave sales synergy in our distribution channels. These were two successful acquisitions with the goal of risk-minimizing since we are no longer putting “all our eggs in the same time and frequency basket.”
4. Can you describe some “metrics” (number of facilities, number of employees, square footage of facilities, locations, etc.) that would give our readers a better sense of Pendulum Instruments?
Pendulum Instruments is a Swedish-owned company with an international presence. We have offices in Poland, Finland, Serbia and four in Sweden. We also have regional sales centers in Redwood City, Calif., and Beijing. In total, we employ about 35 people and have a turnover of around $6 million.
5. Can you tell us about Pendulum Instruments' product and test solution portfolio? How has it evolved under your leadership? How do you envision your portfolio changing in the future?
Our core business is still frequency counters/analyzers, frequency and time references and frequency distribution systems. We are very strong in this niche and will continue to focus on it. We are driven by two different product portfolio strategies.
Firstly, broadening our portfolio with synergy in R&D, where time and frequency measurement, calibration or analysis are essential parameters of new products. Historic examples from Pendulum 1.0 that have extended our portfolio of the first category are the acquisition of XL Microwave company, which extended our portfolio of frequency counters into the mmW range (60 GHz). A range of GPS-constellation simulators, developed in 2010 to 2011 in partnership with Naviva in Helsinki, Finland. This range of products was internally transferred to Spectracom in Rochester in 2011. A range of Wandermeters for telecom synchronization validation, starting in 2000 as a project for Swedish Telia and ended in a global sales success and sales of ownership of our latest Wandermeter product to Calnex in 2013.
Secondly, we want to broaden our portfolio with synergy in sales, where new products can be sold via our existing distribution networks to the same or similar customer categories. Examples from Pendulum 2.0 of the second category are our acquisition of Swedish FLC, a successful niche company for high voltage, linear amplifiers and our acquisition of Detectus, one of the world’s strongest brands for pre-compliance EMC testing.
6. Where are you spending your development resources? What products, applications and technologies excite you most?
Our time and frequency core business is our passion. We want to both deepen it with even higher performance products and broaden it to reach new customer categories. We want to improve analysis features further, not just deliver a traditional counter solution, even if it has impressive raw data specs. We believe that customers of today are not satisfied with a bunch of high-resolution numbers only, as found in traditional timers/counters. They want more, e.g., to view graphic trends, get a measure of short-term stability, view critical measurement limits with alarms, discover modulation and spurious behavior, view distribution diagrams and compare two or more input signals side-by-side in real-time.
We have adopted trends from the oscilloscope market and implemented them in our latest products, such as multi-channel instruments. The CNT-104S was the first benchtop frequency counter/analyzer with four parallel inputs, something oscilloscopes have had for decades. Also, the possibility to upgrade the instrument's functionality via software licenses is an industry-first for frequency analyzers inspired by modern oscilloscopes.
We are also inspired by smartphone technology. For example, we launched the industry's first benchtop frequency analyzer (CNT-104S) with a touch screen color display for settings, result presentation and Wi-Fi connectivity.
7. Can you describe Pendulum’s market focus? Do you see this changing in the future?
We are a niche company competing with innovative, high performance, world-leading products, not at low cost. Our main markets are metrology, military and advanced electronic industries like telecom equipment and oscillator manufacturers. That focus will not change, but we are, of course, looking into broadening our market, for example, in the datacom/telecom markets.
8. There are many companies in the test and measurement space. What core competencies and technologies differentiate you from your competitors?
Our main differentiators are that we have some of the world’s sharpest brains for frequency analysis in our team. Additionally, we cooperate with world-leading institutes and researchers. Our team is world-class and they focus on time and frequency instruments; they do not need to split their mindshare between diverse product areas, as in some of our largest competitors with a very diverse range of products. We have an enthusiastic, dedicated and experienced sales team and world-class distributors in key countries. We are highly skilled in both R&D and sales.
9. The Pendulum team is characterized by knowledge, trust, communication and flexibility. How does this mission statement translate to your customers and how do the management team and employees support this vision?
We are a small company compared to the T&M giants, Keysight, Tek, Fluke, R&S, Anritsu, etc. That allows us to listen to our customers and be very flexible. We can make decisions quickly and produce customized products according to customers’ needs. We have had many successful examples over the years. Since we are a small company, everyone knows each other in a flat organization and trust is automatically built when there are very short communication lines and there is no alienation as easily can happen in larger organizations.
We have introduced a typical Swedish concept of “Fika break,” where you leave your work desk and join together at the coffee machine for about 15 minutes and sit down and chit-chat about anything that is not necessarily work-related, e.g., personal experiences from vacation travel, gardening, weather, tips on good beer, etc. This makes people come closer, and when you return to your desk, you have hopefully gained some positive energy for the rest of the working day.
10. What else would you like our readers to know about Pendulum Instruments?
We hope to be more known by our customers. We see many times that customers order competing products without even looking for alternatives, although our counter/analyzer products have higher performance and lower cost. But when our customers take the opportunity to do a product comparison, the end result is often that our products are preferred and bought. We seem to be more known in Europe than in the U.S., and we hope to change this in the coming years. We have launched and will launch some very exciting products and we hope that more and more American end users will find us.