Business

Cubic Telecom CEO Barry Napier: ‘I love the innovation and trying to solve a problem. The fun is only about to start’

Cubic Telecom’s chief is focused on leveraging SoftBank’s investment in the tech firm to drive it on to further success

Barry Napier: 'I love the innovation and trying to solve a problem.'

Ciarán Hancock's face
Ciarán Hancock
Fri Apr 5 2024 - 06:00

Before his coronation in February as The Irish Times Business Person of the Year, Cubic Telecom chief executive Barry Napier hadn’t won any award since 1983. And that was for road safety.

“I was in CBC Monsktown in third class and I did a drawing of [comic strip character] Denis the Menace, saying ‘Don’t be a menace on the road’ and I won a £25 voucher with a guy in my class called Evan O’Reilly. That was the last award I was recognised for so it was good to be recognised again.”

Napier won The Irish Times award for his part in building Cubic into a unicorn (a tech company with a valuation of at least $1 billion) and negotiating the sale of a 51 per cent equity stake to Japanese investment giant SoftBank for €473 million. The payout for Napier was a reported €130 million and he retains a 12.5 per cent stake in the business.

Cubic provides the ‘pipe that goes from the vehicle to the cell tower back into the IT infrastructure’ of the car manufacturer and then it monitors that vehicle over its lifetime

Some 190 staff shared in a windfall of €75 million from the deal, while big shareholders such as Volkswagen and its spin-off Cariad and Qualcomm remain as investors — seen as a vote of confidence in the future of the business. Napier remains as chief executive of the company.

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Cubic provides connected software to 10-12 per cent of smart vehicles globally, according to Napier. The company provides the “pipe that goes from the vehicle to the cell tower back into the IT infrastructure” of the car manufacturer and then it monitors that vehicle over its lifetime. According to its website, Cubic has 18 million devices connected and is involved in one billion data transmissions daily. It has more than 300 staff and reaches into 190 countries.

[ Cubic Telecom reaches break-even as revenues nearly double ]

Napier became an investor in Cubic in 2008-09 when there were just four people in the business. The company had originally been registered by Cork entrepreneur Pat Phelan, who had a vision to eliminate roaming charges on mobile phones.

“The more we got into it you can’t really eliminate roaming unless you own a mobile network and the radio access that comes with it,” he recalls during an interview last week with Inside Business, an Irish Times podcast. “They didn’t have that. The team were pretty good and Pat was a multiple entrepreneur and was hard-working. We stood back as a team and said, ‘we want to build a platform for connectivity’. We’d become the Apple distributors, the Nokia distributor the Samsung distributor in Ireland. We understood how distribution worked and if we could bring distribution to connectivity on a global scale that would solve a lot of problems. That’s what we did and it built it on from there.”

Before Cubic, Napier had the distribution rights for Apple, Nokia and Samsung in Ireland. “We’d built that up from 1999-2000. In 2008, we were in the top 250 companies in Ireland for revenue. We’d built it up to €155 million a year. We had done pretty well and we’d done a global expansion, selling phones all around the world. We had a good understanding of how to operate in different markets and that gave us some free cash flow and that’s what we used as the investment vehicle into Cubic.”

I started chatting to the distributor and then he offered me a job. That’s how I got into the phone business at 19/20 years of age and I’ve been in technology ever since

—  Barry Napier

Napier’s journey to the top has been colourful. He admits that he didn’t “do well” in his Leaving Cert, failing physics.

On leaving school, Napier went straight to work for a rubber stamp company called Bolton & Co on Camden Street in Dublin. “They had a sign business there and we started doing graphic design and started doing signs for the likes of Paddy McKillen for Captain Americas and so on, and found out there was real money in graphic design.”

As he tells it, Napier’s move into phone distribution came by chance. He bought a mobile phone that didn’t work, took it back, got a replacement, which also didn’t work and the retailer then put him on to the distributor. “I started chatting to the distributor and then he offered me a job. That’s how I got into the phone business at 19/20 years of age and I’ve been in technology ever since.”

What did he say to the distributor that prompted the job offer?

“You can’t be selling this type of stuff and not be standing over it,” he says, offering what seems a sanitised version of the conversation. “I was probably a little bit more direct.”

In Profile: Barry Napier, Irish Times Business Person of the Year 2023

Listen | 47:29

That was a company called MCJ in Naas. After that, he moved to work with Tony Boyle and Des Crotty in Sigma Wireless, where he spent more than four years and then struck out on his own, co-founding Celtic Telecom Consultants.

He later led the acquisition of a component of Nasdaq-listed Brightpoint Inc (Brightpoint Ireland) at the end of 2003, where he steered the company from 15 staff and $35 million in revenue a year to more than 80 staff and $200 million in income in 2009.

“That was really cool,” he says.

[ Cubic Telecom chief Barry Napier named Irish Times Business Person of the Year ]

Hailing from Limerick, Napier’s father was an engineer and his mother a housewife. His mother died in 1986 at just 42, after which his father decided they (Barry and his older sister Gwen) should move to Chicago on a green card visa, where they lived for two years. “After two years Dad said, ‘hey, this isn’t exactly great, is it? Let’s go home.’ I got to ride on the yellow bus to school every day in Chicago and got to see extreme heat and extreme cold.”

At 14, Napier wanted to return to Limerick while his father preferred Dublin. The upshot was that he lived with his grandmother in Limerick for a year, before reuniting with his father and sister.

Napier cites a chance encounter in Dublin with Elon Musk [who was in town for the Web Summit] in 2013 as a light bulb moment for him and the business

His father remarried, with two more sisters joining the family. “A good family background, hard-working and I always had a good laugh with the family,” is how he describes growing up.

But back to Cubic. Napier cites a chance encounter in Dublin with Elon Musk [who was in town for the Web Summit] in 2013 as a light bulb moment for him and the business.

“He was driving beside me in a blue Tesla with an English registration. I was talking to someone from Nokia on the phone and I said them, ‘those cars must be connected’. We did a bit of research and within a few months we’d been introduced to Tesla and by April [2014] we were standing on a stage with Musk ... launching Tesla in China. We got the Chinese and Hong Kong market.”

Cubic was connecting Tesla to the Chinese phone networks once the vehicles had been shipped from the United States.

The Tesla deal put Cubic on the radar of other car manufacturers, with Volkswagen and Audi contacting the company for a connectivity solution for their vehicles. Audi invested €15 million, with Cubic providing connectivity for the company’s vehicles in 13 markets. “We started getting scale then,” he recalls.

By 2016, Cubic was connecting 120,000 cars a year, which made mobile operators sit up and take notice of the Irish company. “We got probably 40 or 50 partnerships by 2018 with mobile operators, and we started getting some real credibility in the marketplace.”

Cubic now has 100 mobile operator partners. “All tier-one operators,” says Napier. Tesla is no longer a partner; a regulation change in 2018 in China brought an end to the relationship, adds Napier.

[Elon Musk is] a very serious guy, met him twice. You just know when you’re with him that the brain is always going; he’s a massive thinker and solves complex situations very quickly

—  Barry Napier

But it has a relationship or is in talks with about a third of the big car brands globally. “Our partnership with SoftBank is about trying to get that up to 50 per cent of conversations,” he says. And he adds that it can be a three- to five-year journey before a partnership is agreed with a carmaker.

What was it like working with Elon Musk?

“He’s a very serious guy, met him twice. You just know when you’re with him that the brain is always going; he’s a massive thinker and solves complex situations very quickly.”

Napier’s career trajectory suggests he has an entrepreneurial gene, works hard, is an ideas man, excels at sales and is “relentless” at work. Once his foot is in the door, he’s coming in. “The one thing that I’ve learned on the journey of Cubic is to hire people who are smarter than you and give them the runway to take off.”

He calls himself the “coffee and entertainment officer”, tasked with making sure the engineers and other “experts” in the business have the space to fulfil their roles.

Looking ahead, Napier’s goal is to double to 25 per cent the number of smart vehicles globally that it connects. Revenues last year were about $70 million and this year he expects to “break” $100 million.

In the years ahead, Napier says our cars will have great smart functionality and will be like a mobile phone on wheels. “They’re talking now about autonomous cars, that you’ll have a smaller car Monday to Friday come and collect you. You’ll be working in it and then you might have a different vehicle at the weekend. So it might be a more on-demand market; it’s just about adaptation and getting used to it.”

One thing he has decided is that the Napiers will not have a family office to manage and invest the windfall he received from the investment by SoftBank

He wants to leverage SoftBank’s vast resources to drive the business to the next level. “The whole idea is to grow quicker, faster, to use their expertise, use their network, use their relationships and drive the value on for the business,” he says.

“We’re very aligned with them on what our goals are. There’s been a natural fit so far in all the communications and conversations. It’s very inspiring because it’s east meets west. SoftBank has over 400 investments in technology companies ... whether that’s payments [or] cybersecurity. It’s all at our fingertips to build out a really strong ecosystem. The opportunity is there.”

One thing he has decided is that the Napiers will not have a family office to manage and invest the windfall he received from the investment by SoftBank.

“We are normal folks, who hang out with normal people and our friends are the most important thing to us. What’s a family office going to get you? I’ve 12.5 per cent left in the company and I want to drive value for 100 per cent of the shareholders. I’ve a track record with a team, of working really well with them and driving value ... that’s what my focus is. If you set up a family office, you get distracted and you start betting on property markets. I’m going to stick to the knitting. I really enjoy what I do ... and I love the innovation and trying to solve a problem. The fun is only about to start.”

CV

Name: Barry Napier

Job: Chief executive Cubic Telecom

Age: 50 in July

Lives: Enniskerry, Co Wicklow

Something we might expect: He loves technology.

Something that might surprise: After receiving his windfall following the investment by SoftBank. “The first thing I bought was this week ... I bought a Dyson hoover in Harvey Norman for €840. My wife laughed at me and said, ‘hey kids, he’s actually bought something’.”

Leadership style: “I’ve adapted an awful lot. I would have been very difficult 10 years ago. I would have been awkward five years ago. Now, I’m a lot more comfortable with myself and that I’ve got the experts around the table to bring the journey on. I need to make sure that I’m not in their way.”

Barry NapierCubic TelecomTeslaElon MuskAudiVolkswagen (VW)NokiaAppleSamsung