He is an inveterate story-teller, a chronicler of south Wales' industrial history. A group of Vancouver tourists gawp in bafflement and awe as he recites the tale of the Powell family, founders of the Powell Duffryn engineering group, including the fate of a scion eaten alive in what is now Ethiopia, and then moves on to Swansea's role as the hub of the global non-ferrous metals industry for two centuries. "I like history, industrial history," he tells them, pointing to a brass railing in the lobby. "You know where brass comes from originally. Swansea. That's where." Then he is gone, out on to a nearby green of one of the three championship golf courses surrounding the £120m resort and off into local Roman history. "See over there, just beyond the clubhouse, there's the remains of a Roman training camp we found, and [a sudden switch of gear] over here we're building corporate golf suites."
But this global player has his eyes fixed firmly on the present and future. His roots may be in south-east Wales, in the Gwent valleys but home is Ottawa and north London - and the revolutionary world of broadband telecoms technology and the high-risk, high-stakes domain of venture capital. "The ability to communicate in broadband is a dramatic instigator of change in everything we do in life and I'm not going to miss out on it," he says by way of dispelling any suggestion, his billions made, he is ready to retire at the age of 57.
Matthews is good at two things: networking and networking. He devises solutions and applications for telecoms networks. Brash, pugnacious, ruthless, demanding he may be - "I take concrete with my cereal" - but he gets on with people. Celtic Manor, which he founded two years ago on the site of the boarded-up nursing home where he was born, is, with its 400 rooms, 32 suites, convention centre and golf courses, a magnet for "the most senior people" in the global telecoms industry. "For some reason they all love golf and I can use the hotel as a base to conduct business - and, no, I don't have time to play."
He has made his money in two ways. First, by building up his own businesses and selling them on, and by providing the seed-corn for spin-offs and start-ups. An obsessive fixer of things - clocks, bikes, cars - in his native Newbridge, he started work at 16 in BT's research labs in Dollis Hill, north London, and turned holidays in Ottawa at the age of 26 into a permanent stay. He set up Mitel in 1972, making integrated circuits and inventing private switchboards (PBX). "We set it up with $4,000 of borrowed money and now it's making $1.5bn revenues.It doubled its revenues every year for the first 11 years and generally in electronics a successful company can do that and remain stable. Anything above that can be unstable."
The company ran into problems with the break-up of AT&T in 1982 and he sold a 51% controlling stake three years later to BT. By then a multi-millionaire, he founded Newbridge Networks a year later and earlier this year, 15 years on, sold it to Alcatel for £4.4bn,($7.1 Billion CDN) taking a 3% stake in the French group to become its biggest individual stockholder. "Alcatel's shares have just about doubled since the acquisition which is good for them and their shareholders, and employees of Newbridge."
He talks excitedly about the spin-offs or affiliates he has helped nurture. "In my career I have started up around 40 companies and I have lost only two, when the normal success rate is one in 10, and some of them have had an absolutely staggering success." He reels off a string of businesses: Vancouver-based Abatis, set up with $5m and sold four years later to Redback of California for $1.2bn;Bookham; Encipher; Orchestry.
Matthews uses as his funding vehicle Celtic House Investments, set up in 1994 and run by an old school friend, Roger Maggs. He says he has invested $100m in the past five years and the companies he so far has not floated are alone worth well over $1bn. "This coming year we will put in $250m. Investment capital has dramatically escalated in the last 12 months, just for Celtic House alone. There's more venture capital available than over the past five years, more than any time be fore." The main reason he cites is the potential unleashed by broadband networking, seeing an exponential, explosive growth in digital subscriber lines, digital cable modems, local multi-point distribution services and the like.
Advertisemen"Demand grossly outstrips the ability to supply and the point is that these networks are always available, always on, rather than having to be accessed by dialling via a modem," he says, a host of statistics about the potential growth pouring forth. "Anything you've seen in the last 10 years in networking technology is just the tip of the iceberg. This is one of the most exciting developments ever in human endeavour because networking is fundamental to every aspect of life."
Matthews has, therefore, no time for the doom-laden forecasts that the "inflated bubble" cocooning the Ciscos, Lucents, Nortels of this new world, even BT, is about to burst. "Absolutely not, there may be a few problems now with the share prices but this is such a titchy bit of the iceberg and the value of the overhaul of the network - imagine, 1bn lines to be upgraded - is so staggeringly high that the entire sector will continue to do well. And the applications are even bigger once the basic highway has been laid. "Until you put the roads in, the cars, buses and garages can't happen. This is dramatic and it's now. You've got to take advantage of the infrastructure and the applications, as in one or two years all the roads will be in place." For all his self-confidence he sees his own role in this process in a strangely coy manner. "Timing in life is everything. If I had done this five years ago, surprise, surprise, there were no roads to run the cars on and now there are. All it takes is just awareness of what's going on to be innovative and inventive," he says, a trifle disarmingly. "There will be losers as they will not be able to accommodate this dramatic change but opportunities are opening up like never before and you don't have to be a builder of the big switchers and optical networking to do well."
The first application of broader bandwidth he sees is in fast-responding internet services - a graveyard for profit expectations until now. But his own sights are set on what he calls videocentric applications: using broadband networks in areas ranging from security and surveillance to health care, where he promises a budgetary revolution.*
Matthews is now chief executive of March Networks, an Ottawa-based offshoot of Newbridge that used to be called Telexis which itself specialised in digital video recording products for security and operations management. Earlier this month, March took over Elcombe, which provides technological solutions for the health-care market, for $15m equity and a share swap. The expanded company, he says, has secured $35m in equity funding.**
"I can now do things for senior citizens in terms of health care which will help deal with a chronic shortage of nurses, for instance," he says. The new digital video applications can enable a nurse to treat or care for 15 patients online each day, compared to the perhaps five he or she might visit or see in a hospital or clinic. He is thinking ahead, according to his own motto: "Don't be boring, do something" or "make a mark, don't be part of the living dead". Amid this restless activity he still had time that day to take part in an "innovation summit" at his Celtic Manor resort and put the finishing details to his bid to stage the 2009 Ryder Cup, due to be submitted on Tuesday. It seems like a heroic one-man endeavour to put Wales on the map.
The summit, attended by Rhodri Morgan, first secretary of the national assembly for Wales, came less than 24 hours after Panasonic became the latest Far East electronics group to scale down its Welsh operations, with the loss of 1,300 jobs. Matthews brushes aside this bad news in favour of the opportunities opening up for artists and content providers in Wales. "We've got to create this entrepreneurialism and this is what they should focus on and they are. It's the first time in Wales I have ever heard anyone as prominent as Rhodri focus on such things. It's like a breath of fresh air."
Terry Matthews, rich dynamic man of the world with a penchant for being a bon viveur, says he is trying to bring a taste of that world to his native country through his hotel complex above the M4. Even his new company, March, like Newbridge before, retains its Welsh origins - the name a play on pre-Tudor times when the region was known as Wales and the Marches, an ill-defined territory with no fixed border. "Henry VII was born in Monmouth and was the Welsh person who became king of England, and his son, Henry VIII, nailed down the border. And broadband is disputed territory." It is a rich region where he would like to be king - and, like his Tudor predecessor, seems ready to chop off a few heads to do so.
source: https://www.theguardian.com
The CV
Born: Newport, Gwent, June 6, 1943
Education: Schools in Newbridge, Gwent. HNC in mechanical and electrical engineering, London. BSc in electronics, Swansea University, 1969
Career: Trainee, Post Office (BT) research labs, Dollis Hill, London. Electronics engineer, Microsystems International, Ottawa, Canada, 1969-72. Founded Mitel in 1972, sold 51% to BT in 1985. Founded, Newbridge Networks 1986, sold it to Alcatel 2000. Now chief executive of March Networks. Awarded OBE 1994
Family: Wife Ann and four children, three boys and a daughter. Sister runs Celtic Manor Resort where one of his sons works. Intensely protective of their and his privacy
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* At the time of the Guardian's article Sir Terry Matthews had recognized the bandwith limitations in October 2000 and foresaw that the B2B Sector of Enterprise HD Interoperable Multi-link Video would continue to develop as the Telco's and ISP's focused on the build out of their 3G/4G wireless networks. By 2007 Magor Corp's Aerus Solution would emerge.
Enterprise HD Video Interconnectivity Solutions
- Government
- Policing
- National security
- Healthcare
- Financial services
- Contact centers
- Mining
- Higher education
- Aerospace
- Manufacturing
** March Networks was aquired by Infinova Canada Ltd for $5.00 per share in an all cash transaction Dec 9th 2011
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