French IoT firm Kerlink is confident it can achieve around 20% revenue growth this year and a positive EBITDA.

This momentum stems from the business expansion strategy initiated late last year based on differentiating high-performance and secure products, and efficient and beneficial collaborations with its ecosystem.

Kerlink gateways stand out through its embedded SecureBoot and SecureStorage features. It also has control over security certificates for marketed gateways (PKI). These have already been qualified and adopted by many groups for which security is a major issue, for example mobile operators.

Kerlink has always designed carrier-grade gateways in accordance with the group’s ISO processes. They are industrialised in France, certified in more than 75 countries and guaranteed for life. Their failure rate is less than 0.1%.

After the Covid years and widespread shortages of electronic components in 2022, the group strengthened its supply chain and secured its supplies.

Over the past few months, Kerlink has ensured that its gateways are compatible with the offers of the main LoRa network server (LNS) suppliers. LNS is the server software that centralises, processes and transmits data from the various network sensors to the final application.

The group observed that its initial strategy of offering its own LNS in competition with suppliers prevented it from accessing part of the market. This pivot as part of a desire for openness and commercial development has boosted the number of commercial opportunities addressed by Kerlink, in collaboration with these partners. Drawing on its expertise, the group says it always offers the LNS that is best suited to the user’s vertical needs and target architecture, while operating the network efficiently on their behalf.

As announced last year, the group has refocused on its core IoT business of design, ease of implementation, remote maintenance and operation of IoT products for players looking to deploy a network for a particular business need. Kerlink has also renewed its sales catalogue to propose offers that match deployment needs and the diverse range of companies seeking to deploy a network.

Kerlink’s Access offering provides gateways that are guaranteed for life. The Maintain offering includes added-on equipment maintenance and network management services through the provision of access to a monitoring and administration platform. Operate is Kerlink’s most comprehensive offering, through which it manages the entire network service on behalf of companies, which benefit from experts dedicated to the monitoring and administration of their IoT network and from a tailored LNS.

The implementation of these offers was consolidated by an overhaul of the group’s business model. This resulted in a review of its pricing catalogue, enabling Kerlink’s customers to benefit from more competitive offers that remain stable over time. In return, customers can commit to a long-term relationship. 

According to Research & Markets, the LoRa market was worth around $5.6bn in 2023 and is expected to grow five-fold to $25.5bn by 2028. This average annual growth of 35% will continue to be largely driven by private network rollouts. In 2019, Kerlink took the decision to make a shift into this type of network.

LoRaWan technology is now recognised as an industrial last kilometre, IoT-access technology for vertical-markets such as smart cities, industry, agriculture and buildings. In these growing markets, Kerlink has the capacity and scalability to address emerging business and significant rollouts involving several thousand gateways.

Kerlink has seen tangible benefits from its commercial strategy: it has signed or is at the negotiation stage on many projects that previously were difficult to address. Since the beginning of 2024, the pipeline of orders recorded for the year has grown by more than 20%.

Kerlink launched the world’s first LoRa gateway in 2013. It offers plug-and-play gateways with zero-touch provisioning (ZTP), so each gateway, as soon as it is received, installed and supplied, spontaneously retrieves its configuration on the Kerlink servers. The configuration data transmitted to the gateway are prepared in advance, taking into account the user’s needs. The gateway also automatically retrieves its reporting procedures via the network management systems. All deployed gateways are automatically configured, connected and supervised. They are immediately usable for the user’s operational objectives.

The computing power and memory capacity of the gateways means they can now onboard an edge option, such as software for processing data from the sensors connected to the gateway to meet application needs. This reduces information processing time in the gateway and the bandwidth used between the gateway and the remote server, thus making it possible to reduce the volume of data to be transferred and stored in the cloud and therefore the environmental weight of the data collected. Thanks to economic gains with this, there is growing interest from companies in this type of network architecture, illustrating the relevance of Kerlink’s investments in this technology.

The Wirnet iZeptoCell series serves the network extension needs of mobile network operators and internet service providers. These products offer on-demand coverage, taking advantage of unlicensed frequency bands for applications that are difficult to address using cellular technologies. Their network access points can thus capture IoT data traffic emitted by LoRa sensors and power their LTE-M or NB-IoT networks.

These offerings, presented at February’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, will, for example, be useful in use cases such as energy efficiency management, energy sub-metering in buildings or the detection of water leaks.

The group takes into account emerging needs requiring IoT connectivity via low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. These technologies are paving the way for the deployment of applications for inter-regional tracking and the creation of local LoRaWans in restricted environments. These will come on the market in the second half of this year.

The initial results of the business expansion strategy are starting to show positioning in new projects, an increase in the number of consultations and opportunities detected. These factors combined with a well-filled order book enable Kerlink (www.kerlink.com) to anticipate revenue growth of around 20% in the 2024 financial year. Additionally, the group adjusted its expense structure in 2023, which will enable a reduction in the breakeven point and improve its profitability, for which it has set a positive EBITDA target for 2024.