WE HAVE BEEN BREAKING MANY RECORDS IN H1/2023
Before we all change trousers and shoes to shorts and flip-flops and start applying 50+ sunscreens to our pale faces, we thought it would be appropriate to highlight some factors, which are part of the reason why the title of this piece is so overwhelmingly positive if not downright jubilant.
FOOTWORK NEEDED
It seems that even though we live in the era of digitalization, old-fashioned footwork is still very much needed. This statement has once again been validated based on the feedback we have received from our presentations and presence at various events, summits, and various types of meetings – public or private. As a direct consequence from these happenings/gatherings/interactions, we have been approached by so many new actors/clients, that our calendars have been full throughout the spring season. These meetings are too numerous to list here, but we must list three special ones: LogiMAT2023, NRA2023 and AOHM2023.
OUR BUSINESS IS EVOLVING
LogiMAT2023 (April 25-27) in Stuttgart was our first big public event together with our strategic partner Navitec System. Together with the engineering team of our clients, we can jointly develop and deliver logistics vehicles and systems, which will operate both indoors and outdoors with the same modular software and sensory setup. That event underlined our focus on logistics, because we have identified it as the main field of operation when we are aiming to move from project and consultation work to better scalable licensing sales with some of our new customers as well as with some new acquaintances.
MOVING FROM RESEARCH TO PRODUCTS
Early this year, GIM Robotics participated in the Autonomous Off-Highway Machinery Technology hybrid summit in Berlin. We were sponsoring the event, and our CTO Jose Peralta, gave a talk titled “Roadmap from Research to Commercialization of Autonomous Off-Highway Machinery”. Dr. Peralta participated in some of the panel discussions and he was available for private discussions during the event. Later in June, Jose participated in the 5th Annual Automation & Robotics for Non-Road Applications in Düsseldorf. His talk “Transforming research into reality: Success stories in commercialising autonomous non-road machinery” summarised our long journey in this field and underlined some of the key enablers needed for successful projects. GIM Robotics was again sponsoring the event, and Jose and our sales manager David Lopez Lopez were participating in panel discussions and chairing the event.
TRENDS ARE POINTING INTO THE RIGHT DIRECTIONS
We have been mostly quiet about our economic results for various reasons. GIM Robotics is a privately owned (founders + staff) company, which has not taken any outside loans or investments, other than taking our long-term advisor into the list of owners and board members. Previous two years have seen considerable R&D investments to our tech roadmap and the first half of 2023 has already proven that we have been doing the right things. The prevailing overall trend in our business is extremely positive and nothing on the horizon indicates that this trend would change any time soon.
NEW RECRUITS
As a clear indication of the positive trend, the number of GIMsters is going up – and going up fast. During the last month or so, we have increased our personnel by more than 10% and new positions were opened yesterday. Based on our long history at Helsinki University of Technology’s (later Aalto University) Automation Technology Laboratory, including our Academy of Finland’s Centre of Excellence period 2008-2013 together with Institute of Hydraulics and Automation (IHA) from Tampere University of Technology (later Tampere University), we are tightly connected to those two universities, which are both producing high-quality M.Sc. level robotics engineers with diverse skill sets needed in this business. In addition, we are blessed to be well-connected to other high-quality universities in Finland and beyond. As we all know, you will fail if you don’t have skillful and motivated staff, or GIMsters as we call our people.
REBOOTING THE LOCALISATION
Localisation of the machines is at the heart of everything that has term autonomy attached to it. For that reason, GIM Robotics has been focusing on localisation since the beginning of our history and will continue to do so even more in the future. We have been actively improving our localisation capabilities, supportive tools, and the level of productization up till the current situation, when we can say that we are ready to introduce our licensable full-scale localisation product called GIM-Locator. With GIM-Locator, our customers can enable their machines’ localisation capabilities in all weathers, even in GNSS-challenged environments without any supportive infrastructures.
POWERED BY GIM ROBOTICS
Our company was founded in 2014. Ever since the beginning, we have been funded through our projects. We have served more than 60 companies worldwide. Some of those companies are huge global mammoths, which are normally very strict when it comes to the usage of their name and logo as references. For that reason, we are extremely happy that we have been given permission to use logos of some of our customers on our Reference webpage. Having the logos of those esteemed companies is greatly appreciated, as they demonstrate our reliability and capabilities to potential new customers.
HAPPY CUSTOMERS. HAPPY GIMSTERS
Getting permission to use customers’ logos is a clear indication that we are doing things in the right way. To do things even better in the coming years, we have been constantly conducting NPS inquiries with our clients. Year 2022 Net Promoter Score (NPS) number was 64, which was already a great result. Even though the newest results are not complete yet, it seems that we have been able to improve our performance during the last year. We are all grateful for any feedback we have received from our clients. We will do our best also in the future.
SUMMER IS HERE
Being a Finnish company, we are supposed to have four seasons. However, today’s climate change hampered weather patterns mean that Southern Finland will have more or less eight months of rain, slush, and some snow – if we are lucky. That leaves us a maximum of four months of warmer weather and even some proper summer conditions. Based on the above, we are inclined to believe that the reader will understand how important the coming holiday season is for all of us.
So, we wish you all a peaceful and sunny summer season. Remember to drink enough water and apply sunscreen often.
