Starting to write this season’s greeting, I thought I would try to completely omit any mentioning of the Covid-19 pandemic. I quickly found that project to be unattainable. But rather than focusing on the obvious gloomy and tragic affects, I will try to circle in on the silver lining. Although the books are not closed for 2020, I am convinced that 2020 will be another record year for Imint, with fifth year of consecutive revenue growth! We recently received an external proof point, as we reached position seven on Deloitte’s list FAST50, ranking the 50 Swedish tech firms with highest growth rates. For sure, 2020 started with a strong headwind, but we did not let Covid-19 stop our ingrained strive for growth, and we are certainly not less motivated to work hard to add 2021 to our list of solid growth years.
Although I take every opportunity to brag about my colleagues at Imint (who with great expertise, dedication and focus are worth all the praise), achieving this growth is really a team play.. Of course, our customers are essential – the value we create with outstanding and innovative products, only get realized when our customers believe in us, see the same value, and put their own efforts into ensuring this value gets scaled to hundred of millions of end users. We work with our customers in multiple ways; for example, through joint promotion as we’ve done in 2020 with for example Motorola and Infinix, and some customers are really pushing our technology envelope and are eager to go to market with novel Vidhance functions. As the old saying goes – corporations sign agreements, but people do business. As we get to work closer and closer with our customers, mutual confidence builds up, and “soft” assets like this do translate to revenue growth – for all parties involved. Strong partners such as Qualcomm and MediaTek provides critical enablers, and all our other partners are aiding and adding up to the result
One thing that for me has become very tangible during this pandemic, is the interconnectedness of the world. Obviously partly for the worst – the corona virus needs proximity to jump from a human host to its next resident. But in a more abstract sense, it has shown how entangled science, business and not at least humans are to one another. While we have seen quibbles on the highest government level between nations, what sticks is rather how much cooperation and good will we have seen. Teams across cultures, geographies and companies have creatively found new ways to get the job done when most things are out of the normal, focusing on ways forward rather than the obstacles. This is very inspiring, so a heartfelt thanks to all our partners and customers that has really shown us what team play is all about.
Another clear observation from the pandemic is the need we have for human interaction, and we are programmed to trust those that we both can hear and see. With global restrictions on travels, video meetings first accelerated as an “have to do”-alternatively, but as weeks stretched into months, the merits of having video meetings – digital face-to-face – became clear and purposeful in its own right in many situations. In a post pandemic world, I am confident communication over video will be an important and invaluable tool for most enterprises. Needless to say, from the perspective of a very video centric company – we endorse this trend and are committed to create best quality and experiences for video communication.
Taking this year of the pandemic as starting point for further thoughts (which is one of the good things with events that rock the ordinary, as it invokes out-of-ordinary reflections), is the importance of a paus in our hectic lives. Many have probably re-discovered the life of the family and household everyday life. And in the absence of anticipation of collecting good new memories through travels, meeting friends, etc., we are doing “memory travels”. We might stop and think – last year around this time, we were visiting… – and we return to those memories through our digital albums of videos and photos. At this point, we do realize the value that we did make an effort to pick up our smartphones and recorded the event, and that we were indeed collecting memories and can playback emotions. Consumer video experience in its fullest definition entails everything from availability (as we get from our phones), ease of use, image-, and video quality, and could perhaps be measured in emotion fidelity. Are those video clips from our best friend’s wedding a few years ago fully taking my mind back to that special day? As you know, at Imint we are intrigued by this life cycle view on video storytelling and are continuously exploring new venues to increase that emotion fidelity. Stay tuned, and you will hear more from us on this topic in 2021!
With that, I sincerely wish everyone a safe closing of 2020, and a joint prosperous and happy new year!
Andreas Lifvendahl, CEO Imint Image Intelligence AB
