Pagerola Inc. is six years old, distributes products in 21 countries, employs more than 800 people and is 1 million units strong, but only this month makes its formal entrance into the United States.
The company manufactures pagers and related paging devices in Taipei, Taiwan, and recently opened offices in Houston and Miami, from which products will be marketed throughout North, Central and South American nations.
Pagerola was not averse to business in these regions before, but demand and growth in other world markets has until now kept the company from launching marketing efforts in the Americas, commented Andrew Andros, chairman and president of Pagerola.
At PCS ’96 in San Francisco, Pagerola will inaugurate business in this part of the world. The company has not yet contracted with any U.S. paging carriers.
Making a splash into the new markets, Pagerola is debuting two new paging products. Beepman is a radio and numeric pager in one, and Message Sender is a unit that allows messages to be sent directly via telephone to text pagers.
Alphanumeric service represents 20 percent of new orders for pagers in the U.S. market, said Andros. Despite numeric paging’s market majority, alpha is growing at a much faster rate, he noted.
Between 30 and 40 percent of new paging users in the United States are families, so Pagerola believes these users will exhibit a healthy demand for Beepman and Message Sender, added Andros. The products also will be available in other markets the company serves.
Pagerola manufactures a number of numeric and alphanumeric products, including the MiniNumeric and MiniText units, which Andros touts as the smallest pagers on the market. Pagerola’s products operate with both Glenayre Technologies Inc. and Motorola Inc. switches and a variety of protocols, including POCSAG. The company licensed FLEX technology and plans to introduce FLEX-based devices in January, said Andros.
Andros and several others founded Pagerola in 1990. From 1985 to 1990, the partners operated Telefind, which produced a line of scanning pagers operating on 11,000 different frequencies in the 150 MHz and 450 MHz bands, he explained. The company recognized opportunity for one-way localized paging in Asia and reorganized as Pagerola.
Asia remains a key region for the company. In particular, China is its largest market. Pagerola’s products also are distributed in Australia and throughout Western and Eastern Europe and the Middle East, said Andros.
Beepman is the size of a typical numeric pager. The radio operates from 1.5 volt AAA batteries, which provide 800 hours of operation, said Pagerola. The product includes headphones and a digital FM tuner. Andros said Beepman will be priced only a few dollars higher than a standard numeric pager.
“I don’t think anyone can beat our prices,” said Andros. Pagerola has “huge volume and tremendous economies of scale.”
Message Sender is a device that allows users to send messages to alphanumeric pagers. Users key in a message on the portable handheld unit. The message appears first on a liquid crystal display, where any corrections can be made. To send, the user holds the speaker part of Message Sender up to the microphone of any telephone and a message is transmitted in dual tone multiple frequency, or DTMF, signals in a coded protocol. This acoustic coupling allows for the paging switch to convert tones into a text message for the receiver. Message Sender is equipped with its own DTMF dialing signals, which most switches are capable of reading.
In response to its growth, Pagerola also recently constructed a $2.5 million plant and office complex that replaces its previous Taipei facility, noted Andros.
He said the company also plans to begin producing terminals for paging and two-way radio.
