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Jakob Dahlgren Skov

NKT Photonics

Member Profile: 

 

his is Jakob’s second start-up/spinout both within the NKT Group. He has worked most of his professional career within the group that today spans from vacuum cleaners, to power cables, flexible pipes and optical companies. He has always worked internationally and primarily with M&A, strategy, turnarounds (business development in its broadest sense).

Prior to his CEO positions, he worked as an executive assistant in Holding. Among others, he helped formulating and executed the incubation strategy for new ventures within the group. They grew nine fully functional companies from zero to +300 people within 18 months. In the same period he participated in M&A transactions in excess of €3.0B and helped formulate a new joint branding strategy for a group of five individual companies, each with more than 100 years of history.

 

Company Profile: 

NKT Photonics A/S is a recent merger (2009) between two sister companies (Crystal Fibre A/S founded in 2000, and Koheras A/S) within the NKT Holding Group. NKT Holding is known for taking relative immature technologies from universities or spinouts and maturing the technology. Both companies were in principle “an idea on a piece of
paper 10 years ago.” Our vision is to embed functionality in the fibers and enhance the usage simply for the end-application. Customers primarily sense, detect and solve with the speed of light. Typical costumers tend to be in sectors like fiber optical sensing (security, oil exploration, monitoring of utility grids), LIDAR (wind speed measurements in
aviation, windmill industry), microscopy (NKT Photonics supplies to Leica´s top of the line product, awarded in 2009 among the 10 most innovative products in the US), life science and finally defense/aerospace. NKT Photonics is perceived as a technology world leader in global niches with a strong IP position. Most applications
sold into are perceived as novel in their offerings and thus require a long time to penetrate the market (can be compared to the life time of a drug discovery). More than 40% of the turnover is industrial sale,
the remaining 60% is evenly split between R&D science and defense/aerospace. NKT Photonics has daughter companies in Germany and the US and expect to expand into Asia in 2010. Most sales are direct sales distributors are used in a few selected countries.

Member nationality: 
Denmark
Company nationality: 
Denmark
Company industry sector: 
Manufacturing