Touch screen company keeps lifting R&D spend

Al Monro plans to increase Next Window's R&D team by 50 per cent in the next year. Photo / Dean Purcell

Next Window - the New Zealand-based touch screen technology maker that announced its sale to a Canadian firm last week - plans to dramatically increase its research and development capacity in Auckland within the next year.

Next Window chief executive Al Monro said the company had signed a lease on an extra floor of office space to accommodate the new R & D staff.

"Our plan is to grow to about 50 per cent more people in the next year," he said.

Monro said whether or not that plan would be achieved depended on the strength of Next Window's sales in the coming months.

The company's plans to increase its R & D footprint in New Zealand should ease the concerns of those who feared the company would head overseas following Calgary-based Smart Technologies' acquisition, he said.

Next Window, which had a revenue of $48 million last year and grew by almost 50 per cent this year, already employed around 55 R & D staff in Auckland.

Its screens were manufactured in Thailand, Malaysia and China and supplied as components for computers made by companies such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Sony.

Both Next Window and Smart were privately owned, although Canadian newspapers had reported that Smart was preparing to make a public offering of shares in the hope of raising around $500 million.

The acquisition brought to an end a legal battle between the two companies that began in April last year when Smart filed a patent infringement lawsuit in a US court against Next Window.

Smart chief executive Nancy Knowlton told Canada's Financial Post the company's purchase of Next Window arose out of negotiations over how the lawsuit could be settled.

Tom Mcleod, a senior investment manager for Government funding body Tech NZ, which provided around $750,000 in grants to Next Window, said Smart's acquisition of the Kiwi firm was a good outcome for the New Zealand technology sector.

"In this case the [new] owners want to build a big business in Auckland, so in that respect it's a good outcome for our investments because it's going to create more employment, more revenue and more taxes," he said.

McLeod said the touch screen industry would be worth $1 billion annually within the next five years.

"Smart will be putting a lot of capital into [Next Window] to make sure it stays number one."