Export Award Acceptance Speech

Export Award Acceptance Speech – Transcript

Meir Bartur: Hello and a good day my name is Meir Bartur I’m the CEO of Optical Zonu to my right is Farzad who is the CTO, VP of Engineering and a Cofounder we’ve been working together for more than 20 years I would like to start by thanking the Chamber of Commerce for its initiative trying to recognize export from local companies and specifically for choosing us this year for this award, we appreciate it very much.

OZC has been in business for 20 years we design and manufacture fiber optic equipment for telecommunication and communication.  Among our customers are the biggest names that you can think about it like Verizon, AT&T, Boeing, Lockheed, Sprint, Spacex, Government and many more.  For years we were counted on word of mouth and web searches for people to find us for export and that’s basically how we built our export markets that actually grew to almost 30 percent of our total sales.  We even have had a failed effort to open an office in London that but that’s a very sad story for some other time.

So, I will ask Farzad to tell you more of what we actually do and then I’ll let you know what we are trying to do about export beyond what we have done so far.

Farzad Ghadooshahy:  Thank you, as Meir mentioned we do the make products for the fiber optic market.  We serve markets such as cellular coverage enhancement, which is providing coverage inside the building, you may find us in many stadiums, very large venues where we support all carriers and all phones to people have access to coverage.  We also provide satellite communication products our customers are SpaceX, Boeing, NASA.

We also provide communication to satellites from ground, we also support the onboard ship satellite communications providing coverage onboard ship to the satellites and finally we do a lot of work for the military and defense, Navy, Army they are all our customers and those are somewhat as unique fiber optic products based on our standard product that we have we have developed already.  So, our standard products are standard for us, we have patents we have IP, we have some innovation so there is some uniqueness here in the LA basin for some high-tech companies.

Meir Bartur:  But going back to export we have decided to actually put a focus on export and the U.S. commercial services have been specifically helpful in guiding us towards establishing worldwide networks of distributors.  With their support we’ve been able to select a distributor in Singapore and build a deeper relationship with some of the key customers in Singapore.  Already we have distributors now in Italy, in Scandinavia, Germany and if we have had a distributor in Israel for many years.  The help of U.S. commercial services cannot be over emphasized, without them probably we would not have been able to access so many companies and to vet so many potential distributors.  So obviously thank you to the U.S. commercial services for your continuous support.  I want to kind of finish by saying that this days of virtual conferences and virtual meetings we hope will also help us reach a much wider audience all over the world because we can do it with less travel, and we can put more focus on materials and other elements to enhance our export.  So again, thank you The chamber of commerce thank you the U.S. commercial services and we hope to report to you much success due to our investment this year.  Thank you again, thank you.