Now it is time for our next block of companies presenting, and they will be talking about IoT and 5G. Next up is Lars-Inge Sjöqvist, CEO for Gapwaves. Warm welcome. Yes. Hello, everyone. Thank you very much, Bob. Hello, everyone. Direct from Gothenburg, we have Gapwaves, and my name is Lars-Inge Sjöqvist, and I am the CEO of the company. The first picture you see here is really from our office just south Liseberg here in Gothenburg and yeah. Maybe it will become a smart city, I hope so. There are a lot of construction work going on in Gothenburg at the moment. Anyhow, this company is really working with antennas, and we do have a technology which is disruptive in the sense of how to produce waveguide antennas. This is an important part if you go higher up in frequencies around in both in communication, but not least also in what we call radar applications. This company is based, or founded 2011 here in Gothenburg by a Professor Per-Simon Kildal. He made the inventions, the ground invention, which has been built on since then. The company has started the growth also coming to the stock market 2016 on First North. That means we have financed the business through a lot of shareholders today, around 8,000. But the specialized piece in the company is really about the technology, how to produce and build these kind of antennas, which is necessary for the next level of communication, but also on radar side. I do have a small film here. I will- The industry is looking into waveguide antenna technology. Basically, a metallic rectangular tube in two halves through which radio waves can travel with low losses. The electrical and magnetic fields from the wave induces electric current along the walls of the waveguide, resulting in high requirement on tolerances to avoid power and efficiency loss. Gapwaves replaces the method of using metallic walls with a metamaterial surface called an artificial magnetic conductor. A unique structured surface consisting of pins has the similar effect to a perfectly sealed wall, completely preventing the waves from propagating in undesired directions without even having to have contact around the waveguide. This allows for an effective waveguide to be built with dramatically relaxed tolerances, meaning it can utilize existing manufacturing technologies. 5G and autonomous driving are run on antennas. We hold the key. That film really shows a little bit what is the technical, so to say, point we need to understand and see when we work with waveguides. You can compare different waveguides, which is the classical waveguide you see on the top of this picture, with what we have from Gapwaves. You see this pin, and the pin structure is really making a very enormous, so to say, advantage when you should produce antennas. You really can rely on having no leakage, et cetera, as you otherwise will have. This is an almost a magic thing when you come to antenna solutions. Some words about frequencies. 5G today is mostly run on lower frequencies than I will say around 3 GHz-6 GHz. We also see that there is a need for higher frequencies for maybe it will be 6G, but also 5G in 28 GHz for communication. Also important to know is that 77 GHz is a higher frequency used for car industry or automotive industry. So that's a standard, a global standard today, which is also important to have in mind. As higher we go in frequencies, the more advantage is it to use a waveguide antenna. Also, our antennas, of course, then. So here are some of the areas we work with. It's automotive radar, things you are having on your car. It could be other radar verticals, and in this case, we can talk a little bit about how they can be used in the traffic management environmental stuff in cities, et cetera. Also, of course, the communication part in this case. That's what you see on the right side here. Typically, when we talk about radar sensors in cars, it's a market which is really growing quickly, and we see it as a mega trend going for more and more autonomous driving. What you see on this image is really the number of radars that will be in each car, and many of these would absolutely be based on antennas of the kind we can do. Today we are really one of two on the global market to provide waveguide antennas for automotive industry. It’s a huge market for us, of course. As always, it takes some time going from where we are today up to the numbers, hundreds of millions of units. Today, most of them are what they call PCB-based antennas. That will be changed over time because that’s too bad performance compared to what we can achieve when you go for a waveguide antenna. One of our customers is Smartmicro from Germany and they really do work with this kind of stuff like traffic management. It’s not really to tell how quick you drive in the car or having a speed limit problem. It’s more about how really you can handle junctions, et cetera, and understand what the flow in the city, make it better. Typically, you can have these radars. You can see how many people or cars you have in a queue, et cetera. You can track things, and you can also see that the flow in every junction will be much more efficient. This is a trend. We see that go very well for Smartmicro as a customer. They are very keen to have more antennas from us to make these radars more efficient and having longer range, but also better field of view so they can look around almost a corner. This is a trend really on smart city side to make cities more and more efficient, so to say. It's not only in the car, it also could be as a static thing sitting on a pole, et cetera, around. That will grow quite quickly, this part, I would say. Something about the different segments we work in. Automotive radar, I have already mentioned, and they are typically we see customers in the size of Tier 1s. It could be Bosch, Continental, et cetera, doing this kind of equipment for the car manufacturers. Radar verticals, other things, smart cities, we see more and more companies coming out there. You have Ouster. You have also typically things like Uber, these robotaxi things, and also Smartmicro, as I mentioned before. The telecom side, we work and really are eager to sell our technology to the big ones on that side as well. They know us quite well, all of them, I will say today. These four here is really the major part of the global, so to say, possibility or market or the market you can see for telecom. It is important to say that we can provide things also in the 5G or 6G environment, but it still is almost everything is done on lower frequencies that we don't really have the same impact on the result. On higher frequencies, it will come. We really have good opportunities to help our customers here, and they know that. It's more of a time question. Here are some of the business we do today. The numbers you see in the balloon series, the number of customers we are working with. In total, we have more than 10 ongoing projects running at the moment, and it's everything from designing new antenna solutions to produce things for customers. It's both on radar and also some of the telecom side we do here. We also deliver a number of antennas directly to customers. Typically, we do what they call imaging radars from us here. What we do this year is really business focus I will call it. It's more into the automotive industry because there we really can take a big portion of the global market, which is important that we now, so to say, take the ground for or make this kind of these, because that will be for many years. We also run hard into new verticals. Typically, we see here imaging radar solutions and a number of American companies and startups into that area. It could be smart cities, it could be also this, as I call it, robotaxis, et cetera. A lot of interesting new stuff is coming out there, and they all need better sensor technology, which is a radar in these cases. We also have in the plan to produce some radar imaging antennas here. The volume we can provide today is around 150,000 per year. We also have plans to grow that if necessary to higher volumes. The last thing here is really to say that the technology really have the chance to be a standard. That's quite amazing to sit with that. I said it before, this job is really the most interesting I've ever had. I can still say that. The reason why you should invest in our company is that we are having very, very interesting customers. Sorry, I can't tell so much about their names. They are confidential, all of them, almost. We are in the mega-trend market if you talk about autonomous driving, but also smart cities, which will dominate a lot in the future. We do have a patented technology, which means it's not so easy to copy us, but of course, there are threats on that side. We are today a high volume manufacturer, potential to become a market standard. I say thank you. Well, thank you very much for those presentations. Clearly, 5G is a prerequisite for smart cities. Could you please explain why, and which use cases will benefit the most from the shift to 5G? If we start with you. Yes. Well, actually, the shift to 5G, of course, is very important, both on the private networks and all over, well, the world. Our goal is to communicate in any kind of way. Yes. We will communicate with 5G or LoRa or actually whatever. The most important thing for us is to communicate. Mm In the best way, best possible way. If we go over to Transtema. Sorry. I missed that question. I thought you would talk to Claes. No, I'll take it again. 5G is a prerequisite for smart cities. Why is this, and which use cases are next in line to benefit from this shift? I would say that 5G is sort of great technology, but of course, I mean, from our point of view, enabling smart city would require a mix of different technologies from fixed to wireless, et cetera. I'm not saying just 5G as enabling smart cities. It's a variety of networks that will be required. Which use cases do you see next in line? I would say the numbers, the examples that everything that has to be mobile in terms it could be buses or whatever would benefit from having mobile communications of course. But in terms of the fixed installations, that the fiber would be preeminent. Lars-Inge, from your perspective. Well, as I can say, I think it's important to mention that to have better performance in your 5G system, meaning that you will have lower latency but also more bandwidth, is very important if you go for any examples like cars which should drive without a driver. If you should use any telecom equipment to run that car, it's very important that there is no latency or almost nothing, because then it becomes very dangerous to sit in the car. Most of it is working normally on the level of in the local system in the car today. We can also see that there will be more and more demands on having communication to the car, not only for guiding, et cetera, also for having a lot of things running in the car, like, movies, whatever you want to do when you sit and wait. Because that will be the future sitting in a car is that you will not drive it yourself. That means there will be a lot of other things you want to do, and communication to the car is, in that sense, also very important and will have a need for a very much bandwidth, which could be a little bit demanding today. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Question from me. What's been the greatest change from a demand perspective the last couple of years? Is there any use case that you have seen being demanded that has really surprised you? We can start with Transtema. I wouldn't say that. I would say that from our point of view, meaning, if we look at smart cities/IoT, it's been a long time with, you know, connecting parking meters and what have you. So it's not in terms of technology, it's just new. I would say that the mobility aspect enabled by the mobile networks, especially 5G, that opened, that is new. But all of the fixed installations has been around for a long time. So there's nothing that surprises me, to be honest, currently. How about you, Claes? Well, actually, it's kind of interesting because when we sit with different municipalities, everyone has different points of view. We do workshops, and you have different visions of what your specific municipality should have any kind of usage. I talked about the bath temperature, which is probably the most commonly used. But it's very different actually. It's a wide area and what's maybe what I can think is interesting right now is that you can use data from sensors and publish open data to use in all kinds of ways. We're starting to use the sensors and the information in... Both in an open way, but also in a closed kind of way. You need to protect the data as well. If you keep data in the municipality or publish it's really a matter of the security. Lars-Inge, do you have anything to add? Yeah. I'm just thinking of one of the customer we have learned from quite a lot is Smartmicro in this case. They are running and selling radar sensors a lot in the area of smart cities or yeah, traffic management environment things. In these cases, we didn't understand from the beginning that it was also important to think of this GDPR that you don't want to have cameras all over because then you also will have the footage, et cetera, on people. Having a radar, an imaging radar solution would then not give you any identity of the person you are seeing or the car you're seeing, et cetera. You can still have it as a sense of the purpose you are in need of. That's a little bit, a new spot coming into us in this sense. Claes, for instance, you're working with Skellefteå, the municipality. Why does it differ between municipalities? Some are investing a lot in this kind of technology, some are not. Which do you see as the main motivations for taking the step and cooperating with a company like yourself? That's a good question. I'm not sure if I have a good answer to that, but sometimes it's. I mean, Skellefteå, for example, is really everything is happening in Skellefteå right now, so why not also make it a smart society? But it's a combination, of course, with good people, good visions, the goal to actually make it happen for real. I mean, there's so many pilots out there. But to actually make it happen in the reality, that's kind of a big step to take it all the way. You have to make some of these good examples. I think the other municipalities will look at the good examples. I mean, there are of course more than Skellefteå, but you have to really decide yourself, "We will do this. We will really become a smart city in five years or 10 years," or whatever the goal is, or right now. Mm-hmm. So. From Transtema's perspective, I mean, you're working a lot with municipalities as well, I guess, or- That's completely true. We do. As Claes said, I mean, let's say, the ambition or the forward-looking, the way different municipalities look at the future is very, very spread out. There are some municipalities, they don't bother in this area whatsoever, and some are very sort of aggressive and try to be innovative, ranging from dustbins, you know, to light poles and not sure what it's called in English, but the räddningskransar they're there for rescuing people that drown there in the water. We see, as Claes also said, lots of pilots, lots of testing, and lots of sort of experience building up. Municipalities, like for instance, Skellefteå will definitely take the lead, and we have Lars talking about Stockholm also in the lead of developing this. I think over time, municipalities will sort of learn from each other and reap the benefits from different experiences all over the country. I think in general, I would say we have a good momentum in the country, and it's gonna be very exciting to see where this is going. Would you say that the municipalities that do, like, undertake these investments, it's really from an innovation perspective and not driven by legislation at all at this point? Not really. Not legislation. I think it's more in terms of two ways, basically. One is, of course, to maybe reduce cost, replacing people having to drive by car, and that's also a sustainability aspect of it, and to perform actions in, you know, in the municipality. Also providing services to the inhabitants of the municipality, to the people living there to include increased services and also reduce costs over time. Mm-hmm. A question I have is that, so Claes, from your perspective, for example, you I guess partner up with a lot of companies in order to supply your solutions. How important are partnerships in this, I mean, development to have smart cities? Oh, it's extremely important. I mean, no one can win this by themselves. I mean, for this example, we have really close collaboration with Skellefteå Kraft and also with the municipality, with Luleå tekniska universitet, and also with Cisco, of course. Generally, you need to collaborate. All the municipalities can collaborate actually with each other. The companies should collaborate. I mean, this is a huge area, so without collaboration, it won't work. Lars-Inge, do you have anything to add with respect to partnerships? As you can understand, we are a more technology company, meaning that we are selling to companies who do sensors and et cetera, and we are not in direct connection with this end customer doing the smart cities so much today. There are some initiative from Japan we are into, but most are through other partners working directly with smart city solutions. Magnus, what would you say? I fully agree that nobody has the entire answer. We have a joint ambition or vision where we're heading, and we see only in this panel discussion we have Claes with the platform and, you know, some of the innovation side. We have Gapwaves with their sensor side. We need to collaborate and work together and sort of develop this jointly going forward because nobody has the entire answer. Would you say, as the last panelists discussed this, that there's still, I mean, a lot of silos? Is it the same? Do you agree on that or? I would say that there are a lot of technical silos, absolutely. Which happens all of the time when we enter sort of new areas or new fields for development. Over time we will see, you know, integration that will increase, and it will be. I wouldn't say fantastic, but it will be very interesting to see where this is going in the future. The interconnection or integration between technologies and all the services that we wanna deliver will be improved over time. Innovation will also drive application and services, things we haven't thought about yet. Jointly we will find them. Lars-Inge, at Gapwaves, you have a customer within the smart cities area, Smartmicro. Which other use cases do you, like, expect to see your antennas being used in the future? Mostly we understand that Smartmicro is selling equipment, and they sell radar sensors mostly to what they call traffic management. It will be a lot of flow control in junctions, et cetera, based on the radar sensor technology from yeah not only one of course. It's a number of them in each junction. To get better flow to lower emissions, et cetera, but also to make the traffic more convenient also for pedestrians and bicycles, et cetera. There is a number of quite tough demand they are solving. Some cities are really trying to rushing into this quickly, but there are also, of course, not yet any standard in this. You can see that it's quite typical that the equipment sold to a company or to a city in China is different from what you sell in Malaysia or in U.S., et cetera. There will be more coming together in bigger groups selling equipment for the whole world, so to say. I don't think that has happened yet. It's quite split for country by country. Claes Yeah ... going back to the partnerships, which areas do you think are going to be the most important? Is it the manufacturing or the go-to-market, technological development? Well, actually you talked about silos, and our view is of course we call our platform IoT Open. It's open for data, open for any kind of integration. We actually launched an IoT Open Academy just a couple of weeks ago. We need to find collaboration all over the world. This is not just a local thing in Sweden. We're trying to find and collaborate with almost everyone. It has different kind of importance depending on what your goal is. I mean, if you want to create a smart city, there's a lot of the different companies that needs to collaborate. I mean, we have to put up and distribute and service sensors like Transtema or maybe we should develop some kind of technology that measures something. You have some other suppliers. No one can make this happen on their own, but together we can really make it happen and make it a great thing. Magnus of Transtema, you mentioned that Stockholm has the aim to become the smartest city in 2040. It's many years until then, and would you say that this, I mean, shift to a smart city is really only in the early innings? Absolutely. We have just seen the beginning of what's gonna happen. You might think that 2040 is a long time away, but Stockholm is a big city, so it will take some time, I guess, to deliver on, you know, deploying all these points of interest that Lars talked about. I would say that if you remember when the first smartphone arrived, the development of technology and applications sort of went hand in hand as new possibilities sort of cooperated in driving each other. I would say we will see the same in smart city. In one municipality they maybe have a great success with some application service that will be repeated in other municipalities and vice versa. I would say that this will take, I won't say, a long time, but we have the best in front of us. Mm. I just can say I fully agree. This is in a very early phase and typically if you compare with back in time when we started with the mobile communication, there is a standard built up on that called 3GPP. And the same goes for automotive industry, et cetera. So far I haven't seen any clear initiative on the smart city side. So I think that is also important to understand. Otherwise, there will be too costly to make this kind of if we should do it specifically for Skellefteå or for Gothenburg or Stockholm, it will be different solutions all over. I think it's important to find a good base for what is, so to say, the common standard to use here. I don't think that is clear yet from my perspective anyway. Claes, do you agree? Yeah. It's absolutely early stage. I mean, this is happening, it's starting to happen right now, but of course, I mean, this, the big opportunities is coming. I mean, the, as I said, with Skellefteå, there's a base level right now, and the next level is to roll out, and that goes for most of the world. So this is very much to come. Mm-hmm. Do you think it will look similar to, as you have done in Skellefteå? I mean, concerning Lars-Inge's comment that it should be like a standard that's being rolled out. We really hope for that of course. I mean, of course we want to be a part, a really important part to set the standard. If we can be that kind of part to set the standard and then get a good example, and well, then of course it'll be great. Thank you so much, all the persons on the panel. It was really interesting to hear your perspectives. Thank you.