management – Korean-Electronics.com

Smart Factory Platform

UlalaLAB, a specialized company for smart factory, recently released an upgraded version of its smart factory platform ‘wimfactory’ – which was applied with industrial analysis engine ‘Snipe’ and thus upgraded into a 1.5 version in both hardware and software – aiming at leading the smart manufacturing market this year.
The wimfactory – composed of hardware ‘WICON’ collecting and transmitting data on sensor and production facilities and software ‘WIM-X’ that stores, visualizes, and analyze data – is an upgraded version of the smart factory platform in terms of speed, stability, accuracy, and analytical skills. In particular, the WICON 1.5 version has proven its capability in the field application for last year.
Thus, wimfactory 1.5 supplies five more intensified solutions for smart factory, namely, facilities management, output management, quality management, environment management, electricity & energy management. The manufacturing company monitors the operation state of facilities, operational rate, based upon sensing data on a real-time basis and senses the abnormal signals of a facility in advance. And this product allows users to stably and swiftly measure output, grasp the cause of the quality change, and manage quality for process improvement, etc.
The company’s president Kang Hak-ju explained “Through our successful release of wimfactory 1.5, we could see the upgraded device (H/W) measuring and collecting data and the upgraded solution (S/W) monitoring, extracting, and analyzing the collected data.
The solution was reborn into more powerful one in terms of speed and stability. We expect our company to draw more attention than ever before in the smart factory markets both domestically and overseas.”
The smart factory platform wimfactory 1.5 can be used with a cloud-based type of SaaS and PaaS and a private type of server construction only for smart factory.
Currently, wimfactory 1.5 is being adopted not only in South Korea but also in overseas markets including China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, etc. for such various areas as medical equipment manufacturing, and automobile parts manufacturing.

korean-electronics.com | Blog Magazine of korean electronics, brands and Goods

A Global Top Manufacturer in the Field of Expanded Beam Connectors

Maekyung Buyers Guide conducted a personal interview with FOSTECH’s CEO Lee Soo-young who outlined the active expansion of the company in global markets.

Please introduce your company and tell us about your driving forces of growth

FOSTECH has maintained its business history as an excellent company in the field of optical communications for 18 years since its establishment in 2001. It has received wide recognition for the company’s excellent technology and in the field of management, including venture entrepreneur, INNO BIZ, MAIN BIZ, promising small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), export promising SMEs, excellent venture entrepreneur, etc. It continues to keep growing as it was selected as the world’s top product manufacturer in the field of expanded beam connectors, which is the company’s main product, especially in 2017. Currently, it gets sales figures of approximately 9 billion won with about 60 employees. It expects to grow with a goal of 20 billion won worth of sales by 2020.
The driving force of growth is constant development of technology and securing of excellent talent.
Securing excellent talent is essential to develop technology constantly. FOSTECH has been performing projects supported by the Korean government every year for research and development and investing approximately 10% of development expenses every year to develop new technology.

Please tell us about your company’s main products

For existing products, it was difficult to secure price competitiveness and the products’ competitiveness weakened due to the low level of difficulty of technology. Therefore, we developed new levels of products. Our company’s main product is a new-concept expanded beam connector. FOSTECH succeeded in commercializing it after about five years of research and development. It secured a stable client until 2025 as it became a key component for the defense program. It also achieved annual export figures of approximately US$2 million from 2016 by diversifying the product based on local demand. Core strategies for securing global competitiveness are to secure price competitiveness compared to other existing advanced products, to secure excellent performance, and also to enhance service. It is expected that overseas clients will continue to grow constantly in the future based on the stable base of domestic demand. For this, marketing activities are being strengthened.

Please tell us about your major export markets and emerging markets

At present, we are directly exporting to about 40 companies in 30 countries worldwide. The market we are focusing on recently is Southeast Asia.

If you have any special management philosophy as CEO, please tell us about it

My goal is to create stable jobs as our company continues to develop the business and to constantly invest and grow in this way. I also want to contribute to society through this.

Please tell us about future vision particularly for overseas buyers and customers

Our mid- and long-term goal is to have over 100 employees by securing 30 billion sales and achieving the 10 million dollar export in 2025 by constantly growing in the fields of communications, broadcasting, national defense and overseas business. For this, we will consistently trying to develop products suitable for the era of the 4th industrial revolution.
FOSTECH grew with the power of customers.
We think of customers as family and we will always remain closely involved in the fields that customers need.
We sincerely appreciate your helping us grow into our current status, and look forward to receiving your continued support.
Thank you!