Following ELA Innovation’s participation in reference fairs in the US market (CES 2015, RFID Journal Live 2015), they are targeting the North American market as their main growth drivers. “Our ultimate goal is to achieve 50% of our sales abroad” said Willy Le Mercier, head of ELA Innovation International Sales. Willy met in early October a dozen of Canadian companies in order to set up distribution and integration partnerships. ELA Innovation will also participate for the second time to the CES 2016, in January at Las Vegas, in the EURAKA Park, area reserved to the most innovative companies.
At present, the company hugely counts on its export development. For two years, ELA Innovation has thus expanded overseas, mainly in Europe, where the company already generates 15% of its sales through specialized distributors M2M for industrial use.
The France-based company has already provided more than 200,000 RFID tags and sensors with very high lifecycle, to more than 250 clients including some very large accounts: Carrefour, ORANGE, L’Oreal, Kodak, Auchan, Lafarge, VINCI Bouygues, etc. And all the lights appear green in the short and medium term: a 60% growth in 2014, and currently 75% in 2015, with profitability of 20%. “Between 2014 and 2015, our staff has increased from 10 to 15 people, and for this year we expect to double our turnover, which was around 1 million euros in 2014,” said Bonzom Pierre, co-founder and CEO of ELA Innovation.
From their patented UHF Active RFID technology, based upon the Ultra Low consumption, the company has developed over the years an increasingly wide range of tags, badges and beacons, to which were added readers and RFID gateways (to an Ethernet network, WiFi or industrial) and sensors (integrated or not) within the RFID tags. Today, tags used for identification purposes represent 60% of sales, the remaining 40% are generated by the sales of tags that incorporate measurement functions for temperature, humidity, brightness, magnetic field, motion detection.
The large range of products marketed by ELA Innovation has enabled the company to meet the needs of multiple applications such as the safety of people (counting staff, presence detection in hazardous areas, indoor location and lone worker protection, etc. ), safety of assets (theft detection, access control …), logistics (automatic inventory, in-door location) or Embedded Telematics (geolocation and tracking fleets of vehicles or trailers, automatic inventory of carried high-end assets, monitoring of temperature and other physical parameters in the sectors of transport, health, food and pharmaceutical industry, etc.).
ELA Innovation is based in Montpellier, in the south of France. The company is a limited liability company with a board of directors.
Founded in 2000, ELA Innovation designed, developed, and patented its SCIEL® solution for long-range wireless identification technology.
