Congratulations on 40 years of TL Electronic! Looking back: What was the most significant technological development of your company?

Thank you very much! Congratulations to Computer&Automation on its 25th anniversary! TL Electronic comes from the era of tube monitors. We remember voluminous, heavy devices, monochrome and in color, in all inch sizes. The biggest innovation back then was the switch to flat, lightweight LCDs. Things progressed rapidly as we developed the pure display, i.e. a passive display unit, into an intelligent panel PC. And later to industrial mobile devices, such as the tablet.

Is there an absolute 'bestseller' and what makes it so?

In our five business segments - LCD, Panel PC, Industrial PC, Mobile Computing, Service Center - the Panel PC segment stands out in terms of volume and turnover and is our number one. We cannot identify a single product from this business segment as a bestseller, because TL Electronic stands for customizing almost every device exactly to the customer's requirements. So we don't talk about bestsellers, we talk about bestsolutions.

It hasn't all been rosy in 40 years - what do you think was the most difficult time for the company?

As an industrial supplier, we, like many others, had to contend with the enormous impact of major global and economic crises. These were primarily the collapse of the new economy shortly after the start of the new millennium, the financial crisis in 2008 and the global coronavirus pandemic. Although these events did not affect our core business, they had a huge impact on it. It placed enormous demands on us - time and again, we had to master restructuring within the company. Nevertheless, we were able to top the slumps in 2020 and 2021 with a 'best year ever' in 2022.

What is the roadmap for the next ten to 15 years?

Ten to 15 years is a very long period of time in the IT industry, so it is very difficult to draw up long-term roadmaps. What we do know, however, is that more and more industry-specific devices will be needed. That is the basic theme of the markets. We will therefore focus even more on vertical diversification and develop products that are precisely tailored to individual sectors. We have already made a start on this. For example, we have expert status in hygiene-intensive sectors such as the food industry. And this year, we have added specified and certified products for the healthcare, energy & chemicals ATEX, marine and defense sectors to our range.

What technological trends do you see that are or will be important for TL Electronic?

The basic trend we are seeing is that the level of automation will accelerate dramatically over the next five years. Measurement, control and regulation will be increasingly IT-based. This will have a major impact on the type of machines and systems that will be built in the future.

Customized IT solutions are implemented directly by TL Electronic's in-house technicians.

© TL Electronic

What do you think will be the biggest business and/or technical challenge in the coming years?

It will be to keep pace with the development of the industries with new, currently required products. To do this, we need to develop products permanently and extremely quickly. We recognized this at an early stage and have consistently joined forces with the Taiwanese manufacturer Winmate in recent years, both as a partner and economically. Winmate is the world's third-largest tablet manufacturer and now has 250 development engineers with whom it is possible to keep product growth permanently up to date.