EXFO says it will see improvements in 2018 due to restructuring
EXFO’s sales were down slightly year-over-year to $58.5 million, compared to $60.9 million in the same period last year. Net loss for the company’s fiscal third quarter was $4.3 million, compared to a profit of $0.9 million in the year-ago period; that figure included $3.6 million in restructuring expenses, according to EXFO, as well as positive currency exchange impacts of $1.7 million.
During the quarter, EXFO bought Ontology Systems for $7.7 million and also announced a restructuring plan in May to move away from passive monitoring. EXFO said at the time that passive wireless monitoring accounted for less than 5% of its total sales, and that it would be reducing its global workforce by about 5%. The company is expecting annual cost savings around $8 million but says it won’t see most of those improvements until next year.
“Although bookings were robust at US$63.7 million, the timing of orders and necessity to rebuild backlog affected our financial results in the third quarter of 2017,” said Philippe Morin, EXFO’s CEO, in a statement. “Looking at the bigger picture, we continued capturing market share in optical and high-speed Ethernet testing in the field, data centers and labs …. We also addressed an under-performing product line within our monitoring solutions portfolio and fined-tuned our go-to-market strategy to sharpen our focus and enhance profitability. We should begin benefiting from our restructuring efforts in the fourth quarter, but the full impact will be felt in fiscal 2018.”
In other test news:
–Rohde & Schwarz has a new executive vice president of its test and measurement division. Andreas Pauly previously served as VP of signal generators, audio analyzers and power meters at R&S and is taking over for Roland Steffen, who will be retiring at the end of the year. Steffen spent 40 years with Rohde & Schwarz, including 14 as EVP of test and measurement.
–Accedian appointed a new chief operating officer, Dion Joannou, who joins the company after spending two years as the senior VP of sales for Viavi Solutions’ Network Service Enablement division. Joannou’s experience also includes 14 years at Nortel Networks, including serving as the company’s chief strategy officer and president of its North American operations.
-Researchers at Chinese technology company Wireless Inc. Asia say that they have achieved a proof of concept for wireless charging of an electric car in motion — potentially laying the groundwork for charging smaller objects such as smartphones.
A wireless charging unit was attached to an electric car and used as a power source at low speed, according to Wireless Inc., which said that the system “automatically adapts the radio wave frequency as the object moves away from the charging coil” in order to provide energy to an amplifier-equipped coil.
“The technique is still in the experimental phase, objects moving in high speed and high-power levels could provide serious challenges to the charging method,” Wireless Inc. concluded. “Until the biggest limitations are overcome, there are a lot of low-power appliances that can benefit from the method, like smart phones and small medical devices.”
–GL Communications has added call control scripts for managing user equipment and non-user-equipment actions such as load balancing and handovers, in the X2 interface between enodeBs, with its MAPS LTE Emulator.
– Anritsu launched a new signal quality analyzer for testing optical transceivers and modules, communications equipment and high-speed electronic and optical devices. The SQA MP1900A supports four-level pulsed amplitude modulation, or PAM-4 bit error rate testing, PCI Express link negotiation and simultaneous multi-channel measurements, according to Anritsu, as well as 100, 200 and 400 gigabit Ethernet interfaces and internal PCI Express bus interfaces.
