Echelon sees revenue trending up in 2010
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Echelon Corp (ELON.O) will start to see its revenue rise again in 2010, but 2009 will be a down year for the maker of smart meters, Chief Executive Ken Oshman said on Wednesday.
"I would be surprised if 2010 would be down from 2009," Oshman told the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco.
Echelon's revenue fell to $134 million in 2008 from $137.6 million the previous year. In 2009, revenue during the first half fell to $40.8 million from $67.7 million in the year-ago period.
The San Jose, California-based company would break even at an annual revenue range of $150 million to $160 million, Oshman said.
"That (revenue) is not distantly out of sight," he said.
Echelon has been hurt by U.S. recession and slow global economy, with many of its utility customers putting off or canceling programs to upgrade their meters.
Echelon's smart meters allow households to monitor electricity usage while sending data back to power providers.
Once the economy improves globally, Oshman said, the smart meter sector would see consolidation.
"The big guys 5 to 8 years ago, who owned metering companies, decided it was a crummy business and sold them to private equity," Oshman said. "I could see GE (GE.N) or ABB (ABBN.VX) or Siemens (SIEGn.DE) getting into this business again."
Utility companies around the world are laying the groundwork to upgrade their networks with smart grid technology, which measures and modifies power usage in homes and businesses, improving grid reliability.
(Reporting by Poornima Gupta; Editing by Richard Chang)
