The New Zealand distributor and technology partner for global marine giant Furuno has a proud role to play in the Japan-based conglomerate’s record sales success.
Furuno, developer of the world’s first fish-finder back in 1948, and now one of the biggest international producers of marine navigation and communication equipment globally, has recorded its largest revenue year – 114B Japanese Yen or $1.26 billion.
Furuno is best-known in New Zealand for superyacht and commercial fishing vessel radars, but tucked away in an industrial area of Auckland’s North Shore, Electronic Navigation Ltd (ENL), parent company of WASSP and Furuno New Zealand, is responsible for opening up a lucrative new product line for the multi-national giant.
ENL, majority owned by Furuno, is behind the world leading WASSP Multibeam Sonar used extensively by the commercial fishing, surveying and defence industries, as well as in the lucrative international superyacht market.
WASSP’s revolutionary multibeam technology with its intuitive design and user-friendly interface is 100 times faster and much more accurate than single-beam sounders.
ENL Managing Director, Gareth Hodson says the very first WASSP was sold into Saudi Arabia 20 years ago for mapping pipelines, and it’s the international nature of that first sale that set the tone for WASSP’s continued, meteoric expansion.
“WASSP has established markets in nearly 40 countries with a number-one market share in many of them, from Asia to Europe to North America, for the commercial fishing sector especially.
“Furuno began its association with WASSP 10 years ago as part of a capital raise by ENL – a hugely strategic investment that secured global channels to market our product, as well as key collaboration with the most advanced R&D in marine electronics on the planet.”
A decade on and Hodson says they’ve only just begun: “Ten years on from that initial Furuno investment, our Auckland-based R&D capability has been transformed while maintaining a Kiwi innovative mentality towards solving customer problems.”
Hodson says the future vision for the group and WASSP is centred around sustainability, from assisting with sustainable commercial fishing practices through to supporting renewable energy exploration such as sea-bed mapping for offshore windfarms.
www.enl.co.nz
