New Leadership at MuTracx

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes

de Geus: At this stage, Sioux Group is to be the sole owner of the company.

Matties: What is your position within the group?

de Geus: I'm on the board of directors. My primary focus within Sioux is establishing these new types of companies, whereby Sioux also has an investor role. Starting these types of equipment manufacturers is my primary role in Sioux.

Matties: You're really focused on equipment and I think this is so important. I've watched other companies try to introduce new products recently and fail. It's a tough game.

de Geus: With high-tech product development, especially for those new types of companies, the innovation process is much different than with the larger companies, who create a new version of product X or Y. When you're a start-up, you really have to take care of that. Lead times are long, so you should be able to go to these investment companies with those developments and be flexible. You have to adapt to new situations and Sioux is very capable of doing these types of innovations.

We have done a number of spin-outs—start-up companies who are currently completely into the mature phase and making revenue and profits. You need the attitude as an investor and as a technology provider to support a company over a longer period of time. These guys need the time to mature the technology, to calibrate a business model, and to establish relations with customers, suppliers, distributors, etc. We've done this numerous times.

Matties: You must have some metrics that say, "We have to sell X or we kill it, or we monetize or do something."

de Geus: If you have an innovation, at some point you look at it and if it's not worth investing any further, you kill it. That's not the idea we have at MuTracx.

Matties: I don't think you approach anything in investment with that idea, but you have to have those metrics.

de Geus: Of course, we also look at it in that way. Now it's most important for us at MuTracx, which has been in existence for more than six years, kind of as a real technology innovation project, to make this into a commercial company where R&D is not managing the whole company. By capturing the real end-customer value, customers will manage the company and all the processes must be supportive to those goals.

I think for MuTracx it's important that we move the company into this commercial phase and start pitching differently and really start talking to customers. Increase your installed base but in the meantime, make it a normal company with normal business processes; in the end, everything is guided by what your end-customers would like to see as their value. That's a big step we will be making in the next one and a half or two years—this commercialization step forward for MuTracx.

Matties: How do you manage MuTracx as an investment group? Did you put a president or CEO in place? How does that structure work now?

de Geus: Currently, either Sioux Group or I am guiding the company.

Matties: You're the leader of the organization at this point?

de Geus: Yes, but we are very well capable of selecting the right people for our business cases. What we will be doing over the next quarter is looking at specific roles to be filled, specifically in business development and especially sales and marketing roles. At Sioux Group, we don't tend to have all the knowledge of all the markets we're in, but we are able to select the right people who have this market knowledge.

Matties: What is your specific background?

de Geus: I have a technology background and did technical university at Eindhoven, in the southern part of the Netherlands that is really well known for technology development. Philips resides in this region, for instance, and we have companies like ASML, which is the product leader in the semiconductor field. I studied mechanical engineering, so my background is technical, but over the last 10–15 years I have moved into more business development roles and investment roles on the commercial legal side, establishing new commercial relations for the Sioux Group and new business cases.

Matties: Did you have previous experience in the PCB industry?

de Geus: Not any more than my experience with MuTracx.

Matties: You obviously think it's worth investing in the technology, but when you look at the industry as a whole, there have been a lot of shifts and dynamic changes. What do you think of the PCB industry?

de Geus: A lot of changes have been going on. I think looking at the Whelen factory and all the potential leads we are working on, we see that reshoring is also an aspect, which, due to these technology changes, is certainly made possible. At Sioux, we have a number of related industries we are active in like semiconductor equipment and advanced packaging, such as the stacking of chips on PCBs, which is an industry very much in motion. We also have a number of business cases related to SMT machines or specific machines that target that advanced packaging market. So more and more trends that we see are all supported by these current technology developments.

Matties: With regard to digital imaging, where do you see it moving in five to ten years and do you see new products?Page 2 of 3

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