Spirent Communications, which is in the process of being acquired, gave a market update this week that indicated the company is still facing a tough trajectory.
“Market conditions remain challenging, with market drivers in line with the previous 12 months,” the company said in its update; in the previous twelve months, Spirent saw a significant drop-off in revenue and profits, prompting cost-cutting measures and ultimately, the recommendation that the company’s shareholders accept an acquisition offer from Viavi Solutions which valued Spirent at almost $1.3 billion. However, Keysight Technologies swooped in with an offer of nearly $1.5 billion, and Spirent’s board changed its recommendation (details of each offer can be found on Spirent’s website here). The Keysight offer will be formally considered at a meeting on May 22; Spirent cancelled a similar meeting for the Viavi offer, which was to have been held May 2.
Spirent said that its first quarter performance is “in line” with its plan but “modestly behind the same comparator period for last year”; however, the company is not changing its expectations for performance for the full year. Spirent closed out March 2024 with $135 million in cash.
Despite its challenges, Spirent highlighted a number of both telco and non-telco areas where it is seeing success, including in its positioning business, automation and assurance for financial services, a competitive benchmarking solution win with a Tier 1 U.S. operator and an “important Open RAN order with a hyperscaler customer.”
In other test news:
–Spirent also this week announced a next-generation simulation system for positioning, navigation and timing (PNT). The new PNT X solution offers the “highest fidelity and most signal sources in a single test platform,” the company said in a release, including L-band, S-band, and alternative navigation (AltNav) signals, as well as what Spirent says is industry-first support for Regional Military Protection (RMP). PNT X can run multiple signals from different PNT sources concurrently, the test company added.
“We have built PNT X with the future in mind,” said Adam Price, VP of PNT simulation at Spirent. “It’s designed to leverage the best technologies for each application, ensuring our customers can achieve deterministic testing at every stage of the development cycle, while saving money and reducing lab footprint. Most importantly, it can do all of this without compromising on performance. It will enable users to support cutting-edge application testing with more precision and simplicity than ever before.”
–Keysight Technologies said this week that it has validated new conformance test cases for Release 17 narrowband IoT in Non-Terrestrial Networks, or NB-NTN, which are available through its Keysight RF/RRM DVT and Conformance Toolset. The test cases were validated at the Global Certification Forum’s Conformance Agreement Group #78 meeting.
–Rakuten Mobile has begun RF testing in its “platinum band”, or 700 MHz spectrum. More details here.
-Privately held testing and certification company Dekra reported financial highlights from its full-year 2023 performance, including that its revenue hit an all-time high of 4.1 billion euros, up eight percent from the previous year. Dekra said in a release that its global revenues “[exceeded] the company’s own expectations and [demonstrated] strong growth compared to its industry peers.”
“In 2023, Dekra once again improved its business performance – despite a tense economic and global environment,” said Dekra CEO Stan Zurkiewicz at the company’s annual press conference. “All six regions and all Service Divisions contributed to our strong sales momentum and our all-time revenue high. Our strong core businesses and our early mover advantage in future topics make us highly confident that we will grow both revenue and margins, and achieve our strategic goals.” Vehicle-related testing is the company’s primary source of revenue, and Dekra said that it saw the largest absolute growth in the “GSA” region (Germany, Switzerland and Austria), but that the fastest regional growth rate for the company was in the Americas.
2025 will be Dekra’s 100th anniversary, and by then, the company wants to be “the partner of choice for cutting-edge TIC (testing, inspection, and certification) services in the growing business areas of future mobility, cyber security, sustainability, and srtificial intelligence (AI).”
-In a recently completed, three-month Open RAN 5G Standalone trial, Vodafone and Nokia said that they achieved functional and performance results comparable with standard 5G RAN, including mobile data download speeds of up to 1.1 Gbps and 160 Mbps in the uplink. Read the full story here.
