Engineering Services Business Segment
R&D Services
In the Engineering Services business segment (previously Connectivity Solutions) Bittium provides product development services in the areas of wireless communications, medical technologies, connected vehicles, and manufacturing. Outsourcing R&D either entirely or partly results in cost savings, and enables the scaling of customers’ product development volumes according to their prevailing needs.
Bittium has long experience in wireless connectivity, information security, and different communications technologies such as 5G. The understanding of industry-specific requirements and strong competence in R&D services, wireless devices, digitalization, and information security, as well as the ISO 13485:2016 quality certificate for medical devices and equipment, enable Bittium to create solutions that bring clear added value to customers and partners.
Year 2023
Despite the prevailing cost-saving pressure in the markets among our customers, Bittium’s R&D services sales grew during 2023. The accelerating digitalization in various industries increased the need for design services. Especially in the Industrial IoT technology market, the growing need for cloud communication creates a need for companies to add wireless connectivity to their products. The increase of European companies focusing their R&D geographically on Europe, has also had a positive effect on the sales growth of Bittium’s R&D services, especially of the device design.
Cooperation with customers continued well. Several customer projects were successfully completed, and the company’s customer portfolio expanded during the past year with several new customers in the transport, traffic, and professional tool markets, among others. Customer projects include, for example, the designing of a remotely controlled system and its connectivity solution, designing of connectivity parts for a traffic control system, and designing of measuring devices and their connectivity solutions intended for professional use.
Market Outlook
Telecommunication and Digitalization
In mobile telecommunications, the implementation of 5G is accelerating. There is a wide range of frequencies allocated for the 5G technology, thus creating the need to develop multiple products to cover the market and creating demand for R&D services for the development of product variants. Different needs for satellite communication solutions increase the demand for Bittium’s product development know-how with the addition of new players to the traditional supplier network. The demand for Bittium’s R&D services is also increased by the need to develop new devices utilizing 5G technology.
As digitalization evolves, secure IoT (Internet of Things) has become a significant development area in almost every industry. The increasing need for companies to digitalize their operations, collect data wirelessly, and transfer it to the internet and cloud services generate a need for Bittium’s services and customized solutions. To this end, the market needs secure devices, for both demanding industrial and leisure applications, which collect information from the sensors used by the device and create a reliable wireless connection to the internet and cloud services. The deployment of 5G and IoT radio technologies are expanding, and the number of digitalized devices increases continuously. The devices will also feature new and more advanced features that will create demand for design services. Therefore, the integration of different systems and technologies plays an important role in enabling complete digitalization services. There are several learning systems and devices under development that use different kinds of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to ease and speed up the processing of large data amounts.
Focusing the R&D work of western companies to Europe, can be seen as an increase in demand for Bittium’s R&D services, especially in terms of device design.
Demand for R&D services is affected by customers’ cost-saving pressures in various industry segments.