UnaBiz to make Sigfox more open following takeover

  • April 27, 2022
  • Steve Rogerson

Singapore-based UnaBiz plans to make Sigfox more open following its victory in the auction to buy the French IoT operator.

In an exclusive interview, Henri Bong, co-CEO of UnaBiz, said he planned to make Sigfox a more open standard and provide bridges between it and LoRa.

The Commercial Court of Toulouse announced the appointment of UnaBiz last week. UnaBiz is the Sigfox operator for Singapore and Taiwan.

The results of the receivership proceeding for Sigfox and its subsidiary Sigfox France SAS were unanimous, with UnaBiz endorsed as the best offer among nine initial bidders by the jury, administrators, the public prosecutor, Sigfox SA, Sigfox France SAS and Sigfox employee representatives.

Over the next few weeks, the administrators, Sigfox management and the employee representatives will work alongside UnaBiz to ensure a smooth transition of ownership to Sigfox’s existing commercial activities.

Business continuity is a top priority for the new management team. Upon handover, UnaBiz will safeguard 110 existing employees from a total of 174 and make financial and operational assessments to protect the firm’s assets, books and, most importantly, mission-critical network and backend systems, to address customers concerns.

“I want to thank the entire Sigfox community for supporting us, and the French government for authorising our investment,” said Bong. “While the transition of ownership marks a new beginning for Sigfox, UnaBiz will definitely guarantee the French sovereignty of Sigfox.”

As a provider of IoT communication services and the pioneer of the 0G network in 75 countries worldwide, Sigfox believes it is still in a unique position to champion massive IoT adoption.

“On top of securing the sales pipeline for Sigfox in the next 12 months as global markets emerge from the pandemic, UnaBiz and Sigfox will strive towards the convergence of LPWAN,” said Bong. “The new Sigfox will reinvent itself and collaborate with other IoT communication technologies to seize new market opportunities.”

To establish a more durable and collaborative global ecosystem, new strategies and governance will be put in place to facilitate engagements with Sigfox’s existing partners, customers and Sigfox operators to align stakeholders’ interests and support the company’s long-term development in its new chapter.

Sigfox offers a combination of low-cost and low-power enabled by a single global network, owned and operated by 75 operators, enabling businesses to gain visibility and track their assets worldwide. With 20 million connected devices and nearly 80 million messages sent a day, Sigfox helps its customers to extract data at a low cost of production and accelerate their digital transformation in key areas such as asset tracking and monitoring.

Sigfox was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Labège, France, with offices in Boston, Dallas, Dubai, Madrid, Paris, Sao Paulo, Singapore and Tokyo.

UnaBiz is a massive IoT service provider that specialises in sensor product design, manufacturing, and data platform services across a hybrid of low-power wide-area (LPWA) technologies such as Sigfox, LTE-M, NB-IoT and LoRa, to power business growth. Based in Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, France and Netherlands, it has deployed over 1.4 million sensors globally in 28 countries, focusing on applications such as smart metering, facilities management, asset management and asset tracking.

Why did UnaBiz want to buy Sigfox? Read the blog here.