TimeTec - Cloud Solutions for Smart City

The Covid-19 outbreak has taken the world by surprise in 2020, impacted most industries negatively. Coronavirus has brought with it the economic damage on a vast scale. Time magazine even published a big cross on 2020 cover in its December issue to mark the year 2020 as a wasteful year to many. In fact, no businesses are immune to the "plague"; but to TimeTec, the pandemic has brought us a mixture of good and bad effects.

First and foremost, FingerTec sales were reduced due to domestic and global lockdown. But when the business slowly reopened, we have timely introduced the body-temperature reading embedded AI-face recognition device and its integrated software solutions for time attendance, access control and visitor management, and these solutions helped us regain the sales momentum. Nonetheless, the sales figure is still lower than in previous years.

Despite the adverse effects, a good impact during this pandemic that has been broadly agreed is the acceleration of digital transformation, which is turbo-charged by cloud computing. It is proven in contrast to our FingerTec sales, the demands for our B2B cloud solutions are increasing, contributing positively to our subscription-based income and driving higher revenue compared to the previous years.

And the world is coming to a technology-crossroad, the shifting from 4G to 5G, where coronavirus is obviously giving an extra push for the demand.

What would be the significant difference between 4G and 5G? Regardless of network speed and technology differences, we may conclude that "4G changes our life, and 5G restructures our society."

In the past ten years, we have witnessed how 4G fueled and mushroomed the B2C models. Almost every individual's lifestyle was changed, and everybody was consuming immense contents and a myriad of services offered by social networking sites, e-commerce portals, video streaming providers, O2O platforms etc. All from a small screen that they hold in their hands.

In the next ten years, the arrival of 5G is expected to energize tens of thousands of soaring B2B models, which use cloud computing, along with Big Data, AI, IoT and AIoT (Artificial Intelligence of Things) technologies as fundamentals. 5G is predicted to cause explosive demand on IoT sensors that can power all types of industries and uplift the IR 4.0 to a whole new level. We envisage that 5G would remove the barrier between different industries, relates the unrelated, and eventually reconstructs organizations and business boundaries.

And due to the liberation of data and free flow of the massive data from one activity to another, we shouldn't consider business organizations as multiple rigid entities but should establish the connectivity and rebuild them in an ecosystem perspective.

Let's take an autonomous car as an example. We can imagine in the era of driverless-driving, people will neither need to own a car, nor they have to learn how to drive. Hence, automakers have to reduce production capacity and joint-force with the e-hailing provider or decide to operate e-hailing by themselves.

Since road accidents would no longer be caused by human negligence, it would change the insurance industry, as the insured would be the carmakers or e-hailing providers rather than road users. Fewer cars on the roads, less parking space needed, more space can be spared for the architect to redesign shopping malls, office buildings and residential areas. It leads to the change of the entire construction industry, and finally, the formation of a new type of city. And, before the driverless era arrives, the new traffic rules must therefore be re-written too. One thing leads to another, and eventually, all of these would alter the social structure and society.

The above is only the depiction of the future automotive industry. By removing the human driver, it brings along a chain of changes. What about its impact on other industries when the world started adopting the 5G technology?

I recall when the new millennium started 20 years ago, the use of fingerprint technology in the enterprise was still novel to the world, our bold decision to commercialize it at that time had won us the following 20 years of prosperity. But no technology can last forever, for us to continue to thrive, or to win the next ten years, ten years ago we have already made up our mind to shift our B2B business focus from hardware-oriented to software-oriented and developed our solutions based on the new trend of cloud computing and software-defined hardware or IoT devices under new branding, TimeTec. Over the years, one by one, and more and more TimeTec cloud solutions launched into the market. From standalone solutions, the solutions are steadily integrated to become a more complex interconnected cloud ecosystem to power everyone's work life and home life via the smart office and smart residential solution categories.

It seems our ten-year effort catches up with the new normal caused by the pandemic and it's in line with the digital transformation trend. Since we had started ten years ago, we are better prepared than many others in welcoming the ever-challenging new world.

And I'm here to invite you to join us winning over the next ten years.

Teh Hon Seng
Group Chief Executive Officer