Wavecom Enhances Latin America Presence with New Office in Brazil

Regulatory News: Wavecom (Paris:AVM) (NASDAQ:WVCM) announced today the formation of a local office in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Joining Wavecom as Country Manager is Otavio Silva. He will have broad responsibility for driving business growth in this important market. Brazil represents about 70% of the total South American market and is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years to become one of the world’s largest M2M markets. Otavio Silva comes with over 24 years’ experience of electronics sales development in Brazil, most recently with Richardson Electronics do Brasil. At Richardson, he was responsible for organizing their sales structure, including client segmentation and strategic account planning in the South American region, with Brazil being, by far, the largest market. Prior to that, he worked for Samsung Semiconductors, Banco Mercantil do Brasil, Italtel and began his career at RCA/Philco – SID Microelectronica. Commenting on the new position he says, "Brazil is growing dynamically and Wavecom is well positioned to take significant share in the market for applications including automotive, metering, alarm systems, and point-of-sale devices.” The move reinforces the ongoing Wavecom focus on the growing markets throughout Latin America. With personnel in the region providing local support to Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and now Brazil, as well as outstanding distributor support for Chile, Argentina and throughout all of Latin America, Wavecom is well positioned to deliver best-in-class support to customers throughout the region and will continue to expand its direct presence to better service customers there. "For us, the service is 100%,” says Luis Garza, CEO of Orbtech in Mexico, adding that local Wavecom presence is "one of the reasons we are very comfortable doing business with Wavecom and will keep doing business with Wavecom.” Local support "is very important,” says Martin Gonzalez, General Manager of Integra Ingenieria y Diseño "because we have direct support in our own language.” Hugo Galindo, Engineering Manager for LPL Development agrees, "It is a very common problem to get technical support from other vendors, because most of the time it is only available in English, and not all of our engineers speak English.” Gabriel Escallon, Vice President of Engineering at DCT in Colombia appreciates the Wavecom commitment to Latin America. "This is very important,” he says. "We have seen the interest of Wavecom in Latin America region and we know they know how important it is going to be and how it’s growing.” Customers in Brazil are looking forward to enhanced support as well. "It is very good for Wavecom to have an office here in Brazil,” says Carlos Cecanecchia, Director of MobiPower in Brazil. "It will allow Wavecom to work more closely with the customer.” ABI Research expects the Latin America market for M2M technology to more than triple over the next five years. "We are in a leadership position in many of the local markets in Latin America and are confident in the entire region’s coming growth,” says Stefan Lindvall, President of Wavecom, Inc. "That’s why we’ve decided to expand our presence there into Brazil to better service this rapidly expanding market.” Wavecom do Brasil Ltda. is located at Rua Funchal, 418, Vila Olimpia, Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil, and can be reached by calling +55 11 3521 7347. Wavecom – the wireless M2M experts Wavecom is a leading provider of embedded wireless technology for M2M (machine-to-machine) communication. We provide a range of GSM/GPRS, CDMA, EDGE and 3G Wireless CPUs; programmable processors which also act as wireless modules or wireless modems. These are backed by a C and Lua-based cellular wireless software suite which includes a real-time operating system (RTOS), a software development environment based on Eclipse™, and several Plug-Ins (GPS, TCP/IP, security, Bluetooth™, Lua script and more). We also offer a wide range of professional and operated services. Our solutions are used for automotive telematics, smart metering, fleet management, GSM/GPS/satellite tracking, wireless alarms, wireless POS (point of sales), WLL (fixed voice), remote monitoring and many other M2M applications. Founded in 1993 and headquartered near Paris, France, Wavecom has subsidiaries in Hong Kong (PRC), Research Triangle Park, NC (USA), São Paulo (Brazil), Farnborough (UK) and Munich (Germany). Wavecom is publicly traded on Euronext Paris’ Eurolist in France (AVM) and on the Nasdaq exchange in the U.S. (WVCM). http://www.wavecom.com