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May, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 7
The most efficient way to obtain these pictures from an economic point of view, Negulescu real- ized, was with UAVs. So he cast about for a com- pany that could do it for his African client. And he found one in a suburb of his home town, Roma- nia’s capital of Bucharest.
When he realized how good AFT’s technology was, he decided to take an ownership position in the company — a transaction he completed in mid- March 2018.
He and his partners — AFT founders Emanuel Popp and Ionel Mindru — have come up with a step-by-step strategy to transform the 30-person company into Europe’s flagship commercial and small tactics UAV manufacturer, with an eye to- ward licensing its technologies on the US market.
It includes creating all of its UAV technology in-house, focusing on defence applications at first, and having companies with global reach help market its products once it has achieved the manufacturing prowess it wants.
Negulescu may be young, but he is in no hurry to rush a business opportunity or cut corners to boost profitability. He knows that the massive accumu- lated flight time of the company’s UAVs and their best-in-class technology would already make an attractive offer for venture capital firms in Silicon Valley and London. But he doesn’t want external in- vestment at all, and is taking a strategic, long-term approach to developing AFT, with his ultimate goal to make it an anchor industry for a thriving Roma- nian defence sector based on innovation.
“One of AFT’s big advantages,” he told bne IntelliNews, “is that it creates all of the technology on its own.”
Many UAV makers, especially those in Europe, use other companies’ components in their products, rather than making them all themselves, he said. “They are technology integrators,” he noted.
From its inception in 2004, AFT decided to create everything itself. One reason was to prevent it from being held hostage to the quality — or lack of quality — in other companies’ components.
The company is offering three UAV models at the moment, each with several configurations and both military and commercial applications. The smallest is the electric-propelled Hirrus. The in- termediate-sized one is the fuel-propelled Signus. And the third is the fuel- or jet-propelled Quarrus, an aerial target system that armed forces can use to train troops in missile and artillery ground-to- air fire. AFT is also working on a UAV with vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capabilities, like Brit- ain’s famous Harrier Jump Jet called the Signus 35V. The company’s main customer so far has been the Romanian armed forces.
“We’ve done thousands of hours worth of flights to help their troops train in ground-to-air combat,” Popp said. “This kind of flight time would have been impossible to accumulate anywhere else.”
The flights not only improve Romanian forces’ sharp-shooting, but also help AFT make its technology even better.