Management Motivations is a new series of articles by Quectel’s senior executives that explores their management styles, approaches to the challenges of further developing the company and what drives them to lead and succeed.

Number 4: Don’t get distracted by sophisticated technologies, harness them to drive your career and business forward

I’m a technologist and, after I graduated from university it was clear that communications was the most attractive technology for me. I’d seen classmates working on web design and PC software but I saw more opportunities and more interest in the communications industry so I committed to this. After five years of further work, my choice was made but I have no regrets, communications is still exciting and there is so much innovation and development going on.

From an academic point of view, technologists can get distracted by theoretical ideas but I find technology in the real-world more interesting. This is what we do at Quectel. We’re not a company that confines our product and technology development in-house and works in isolation from the market and our customers. We always talk to customers to understand what they want and how the market is developing.

We then take those learnings and go to our cellular team and combine their expertise to create what the customer wants. Our perspective is always to the make the customer’s device design as easy and possible for them. Then, we add more value on top of our module.

In the beginning the value might be the chip itself and later we can add high-quality services or improve ease-of-use. We might also embed a software layer to enable applications onto the module.

It’s clear that the tide has turned towards IoT and ubiquitous connectivity is driving that marketplace. We’ll see hyperscale volumes emerge in the next few years and a range of new technologies will transform the market. My philosophy is to keep it real and focus on harnessing those technologies for the benefit of Quectel and our customers plus, of course, their customers.