MWC was strange for Sequans Communications last year; it was the week after its proposed $249 million sale to Japanese chipmaker Renesas Electronics was called off because of an “adverse tax ruling”, and the firm spent the week explaining its position to customers, and reassuring them it was not about to go pop. The intervening period has hardly been easy for the sector; this year’s big MWC jamboree was foreshadowed in January by Swiss IoT module maker u-blox’s shock decision to quit cellular IoT. And so, a year later, Sequans still finds itself explaining and assuring customers, to an extent. Except its story is better this time, and the conversation quickly moves on.
“Yes, it was tricky last year because Renesas had just stopped the deal. So we were telling customers not to worry, that Sequans had a lot of capabilities, still. But yes, we were in crisis mode, effectively,” says Olivier Pauzet, executive vice president for marketing and strategy at the French firm, ensconced in a meeting room at the back of its stand in Barcelona – which looks like it has seen some action over the past three days. What a difference a year makes; most notably, a clever deal last August with Qualcomm for the sale of its LTE (4G) technologies, which licenses Sequans to continue to innovate and profit from them, has put Sequans on a firmer footing.
Pauzet explains: “The Qualcomm deal brings two things: a cash benefit, which is very useful, and strong recognition of our technology. For anyone that asked if our technology was any good, this gives the answer. But no one asks anymore – because a company like Qualcomm has spent that amount of money on our technology. It tells you our technology is the best in the world.” There is no (official) word on the value of the Qualcomm contract, but the sense is it is rich enough for Sequans to put the Renesas investment loss behind it. On top, Sequans has taken receipt of a €10.9 million grant from the French government as part of its France 2030 initiative.
The purpose of the French handout is to support technologies “deemed to be strategically important to the national interest” – and recent geopolitics have elevated Sequans on the European tech scene, as well. Pauzet comments: “We start 2025 with a very strong 4G portfolio, with our Monarch 2 and Calliope 2 products (based on 4G/LTE IP now sold to Qualcomm), which continue to gain traction. All our energy is now going on their migration to 5G.” Indeed, the firm teased third-generation versions of both (available for sampling in 2026) at MWC, twinning enhanced RedCap (eRedCap), a lower-power iteration of reduced capability (RedCap) 5G, with LTE support, as per their forbears.
To be more precise, the new Monarch 3 solution adds eRedCap to the firm’s flagship dual-mode Cat-M/NB-IoT Monarch system; the Calliope 3 solution adds the same to its Cat-1bis product. As such, they provide an early 5G upgrade path in silicon for low-power wide-area (LPWA) cellular IoT applications. Sampling in early 2026, with commercial availability about a year later (“2027 maybe, or something; it takes nine months to be designed into products”), might sound like a way-off, but it is an ambitious schedule. Stripped-back eRedCap is only a feature in release 18-level 5G networks, remember, which are nowhere-to-be-seen among telco operations, as yet.
But Sequans has good form – remember – as a pioneer brand in the cellular IoT space. Pauzet is happy to remind us, anyway. “We were the first company to create WiMAX a long time ago; and then WiMAX disappeared, and we focused on IoT, and were the first to launch a Cat-M chipset. And we were the first to do Cat-1bis, as well – and the only one doing it in Europe; the only one that is not Chinese. I mean, Qualcomm is doing it as well, now – but both of us are using the same Sequans IP. And we are putting all of that expertise into play now to develop a purpose-built chipset for IoT to work on 5G – which is low power, low cost, very efficient, very small, dedicated to IoT.”
Just on those credentials, and for some competitive context: module maker u-blox, now vanished, had developed its own Cat-M/NB-IoT chipset, and was later using Qualcomm, among others; Sony Semiconductor Israel and Nordic Semiconductor make Cat-M products; ST Microelectronics, an MCU specialist, has an NB-IoT chip play, and nothing else; most of them make stripped back LTE (Cat-1 and higher) units, repurposed for IoT. The argument from Sequans is that it occupies a rarefied field among its European rivals, as a supplier of all the dedicated and optimised cellular IoT standards (NB-IoT, Cat-M/LTE-M, and Cat-1bis), plus it produces the whole stack (silicon to module).
Which gives it authority in the IoT market, argues Pauzet. Indeed, the discussions at MWC this time are as much to map-out the future, as to re-tell the Sequans story. He says: “People know what we did in the past, and are asking us what will happen in the future – because of the geopolitics, and because the likes of u-blox have left the market; which nobody expected. People want to know if the same will happen with this player and that player. And they see that Sequans owns the technology – the chipset, software, module – and so it is here to stay. And with this deal with Qualcomm, and with this work on 5G, they know we will be here in 10 years. All of that creates a lot of interest in us.”
The aborted Renesas episode is not without its upside, too. The pair had developed a 5G-based broadband system-on-chip (SoC) together for higher-power IoT applications, under the Taurus brand; the first chipset in the series, the TaurusLT, was geared to support for RedCap (5G), with a fallback to Cat-4 LTE (4G). It has since been put on hold, following the collapse of the deal with Renesas and the shift in strategy at Sequans. “The reason we can go so fast with eRedCap, apart from our DNA, is because we have good experience in 5G – because of the work with Renesas at the time of the deal. It means we have the protocol stack, already, which we are repurposing for IoT.”
Pauzet adds: “It is our technology, and not part of the Qualcomm deal. The strategy is to innovate in 5G, and to be the first chip company with a very efficient eRedCap solution for IoT – to provide a long-term migration path from 4G to 5G.” It might be noted that its new money, from Qualcomm and the French government, is already being put to work; the company acquired Swiss firm Advanced Circuit Pursuit (ACP) for an undisclosed fee in January. ACP produces integrated circuits, radio frequency (RF) transceivers, and SoCs for cellular IoT (and 5G broadband) modules. The deal will help its RedCap development, it argues.
Pauzet restates the whole strategy: “There are three things. Firstly, this IoT market needs its own chipsets, which are purpose-built for low power and high efficiency, to support a device for 10 years in the field. The idea that you can reuse a chipset that was developed for something else is wrong. You need that vision and investment in the silicon layer. Secondly, if you’re only making modules, then it is going to be hard – because you don’t own the technology. If you have the chipset, as well, you are in a better position. Thirdly, you have to support this 5G roadmap. Migration will happen fast in some markets, and slow in others – but it will happen, as it has with 2G and 3G, as it will with 4G.”
It might be worth, here, addressing the elephant in the room – just about the business case for purpose-built cellular IoT. Because it still looks like a marginal game, and a patchy mess of different network technologies, globally; the demise of u-blox in the cellular IoT hardware space, most notably, and the decision by AT&T in the airtime business, to shutter its NB-IoT network, have further unsettled an already rocky market place. NB-IoT, in particular, looks like a parochial concern, at best, and a basket case, at worst. Pauzet responds: “Nol, NB-IoT is not flying, but there is still a business in it. And Cat-M is very successful, as the anchor for the whole market.”
He adds: “Cat-M made the market realise cellular IoT can work. But there is also a gap in it, too, which has been filled by Cat-1bis. The Chinese will tell you Cat-1bis will rule the world; the Europeans will tell you it is all Cat-M. We are more balanced; we are the only one doing both. We see an opportunity for both. Customers want both, depending on their use cases. If you want to do smart metering, and you have Cat-M coverage, why would you go with Cat-1bis? If you want to do fleet management all over Europe, with certain bandwidth, then Cat-1bis is the way to go. And then, eRedCap brings better latency and some other goodies that only come with 5G.”
Yeah; definitely, maybe. Spectrum efficiency and network simplicity, more than use cases, will drive eRedCap network upgrades in some markets after 2028/28, and eRedCap hardware prices will fall some time after that – though to spark talk about massive IoT again. In the meantime, there is a long innovation ramp that Sequans wants to race up to capture the imagination and drive the market like – in the way it always has, it says. Certainly, these are brighter days. Pauzet responds: “Yeah, it’s much brighter. We are one of the few cellular IoT companies that is really confident about the future – which is investing massively for our customers, and for the whole market.”
