Back from the East

Having spent three years managing Motorola Solutions’ Asia Pacific business, operating out of Singapore, prior to his current role and having played a key part in securing the company’s major public safety contracts in Northern Europe, Iain Clarke’s far-flung expertise makes him well-positioned when it comes to discussing the global PMR market.

One of the things he has noticed is that on the public safety side, “a lot of the end-users are protecting against very similar threats (crime and terrorism) and grappling with the same kind of issues. In Australia, they have been very focused on their response to big bush fires over the years; then I look at some of the fires we’ve had in Europe. I was recently with a Norwegian customer and they [discussed] all the forest fires they’ve had in Norway and Sweden. So, I don’t really see differences from an end-user point of view.”

On the commercial side, one of the biggest regional differences Clarke sees is the sheer amount of new transportation infrastructure being built in Asia, such as roads, airports and metros, and many of these projects often require their own two-way radio network. “In Asia you have three of the four most populated countries in the world – China, India and Indonesia – and one of their challenges is moving that vast number of people around. In China, we might be bidding [on] 20 or 25 metro projects at any one time and we’ve seen that [scale of development] spread to the other populated countries in South East Asia as well.”