Early growth
By 1971, Rakon had moved into its own premises and employed over 30 staff; it had also begun exporting the crystals to Australia and South East Asia. In 1972 Warren Robinson set up a second manufacturing plant in Singapore to supply the growing markets of Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines and Taiwan.
Crystal crash
Around 1980, Warren Robinson's eldest son, Brent Robinson, joined Rakon as managing director. Brent was made responsible for the crystal manufacturing business, while Warren focused on his other expanding business, Rakon Computers, which at the time owned the distribution rights for Unix in Australia and New Zealand.
Around this time, a new technology began being widely adopted in radio designs, frequency synthesis. This meant that rather than a radio requiring a pair of crystals for every frequency (one for transmit and a second for receive), only one single crystal was required. The impact of this was that Rakon's core crystal business was in rapid decline, with the total market size shrinking to 10% of its previous size.
TCXO development
In the mid-1980s, Brent came across a product type known as temperature-compensated crystal oscillators. These were mainly being manufactured in Japan at the time and were used, in particular, in cellular phones.
By the late 1980s, Rakon was supplying TCXOs to NEC Australia's Melbourne factory. The supply of these products became the main focus of Rakon's operations.
In order to increase the manufacturing volume, reduce the cost and improve the performance of the products, Rakon developed its manufacturing processes.
GPS market
In 1991, the company began supplying frequency references in the GPS industry.
Public listing
Rakon continued to focus on developing products for the GPS market. In 2006, they claimed to still hold over 50% market share in the autonomous GPS market (GPS which functions without assistance from the CDMA phone network).
In early 2006, Rakon announced they would list on the New Zealand stock exchange, and on 13 April, released their IPO prospectus.
In March 2007, Rakon acquired the frequency-control products division of C-MAC Microtechnology. This acquisition gave Rakon a European-based operation, including 2 factories located in the UK and France. The new business unit specialised in other forms of wireless communications and allowed Rakon to become less dependent on the GPS market, and expanded Rakon's product range to include oven-controlled crystal oscillators (OCXO), voltage-controlled crystal oscillators (VCXO), the Pluto ASIC and a range of low performance commodity products.
In 2008 Rakon formed a joint venture with (Centum Electronics) to manufacture high value telecommunications infrastructure products and to commercialise Rakon France's R&D programme. Also in 2008, Rakon formed a joint venture with (Timemaker) to vertically integrate quartz crystal supply.
In 2011 Rakon opened a joint venture facility, Rakon Crystal Chengdu, in China. The investment was an unsuccessful one, with Rakon exiting from its 80% stake in the Chengdu factory in July 2013.[5]
Between 2012 and 2014, Rakon suffered a drop in revenue and margins and made a series of losses, shedding up to 86% of its market capitalisation compared to five years prior.[6]
