Tait and University of Canterbury win commercialisation award

Tait Communications’ and the University of Canterbury’s (UC) Wireless Network Partnership has been named winner of the BNZ Supreme Award at the 2014 KiwiNet Research Commercialisation awards.

Tait and UC also took home the Minter Ellison Rudd Watts Research and Business Partnership Award, which recognises the relationship between a research organisation and business that delivers significant commercial value for New Zealand.

Tait’s Chief Marketing Officer, James Kyd, accepted the award on behalf of Tait alongside the University of Canterbury’s Fred Samandari.

“Our partnership with UC and the Wireless Research Centre (WRC) has yielded significant commercial results for Tait across many solutions we are selling today," said Kyd. "The partnership includes outstanding work enhancing the performance of Long-term Evolution (LTE or 4G) broadband to support the highly demanding application needs of our global public safety, utility and extractive industry clients.”

“We are currently implementing our first LTE commercial trial and we’re positive that it will open up new export markets for Tait and put us ahead of our competition in what we can deliver.”

The Tait Foundation, the charitable trust set up by the company’s founder, Sir Angus Tait, has donated NZ$2.2 million in cash and committed additional funding of around NZ$500,000 a year for the next two years to the WRC.

Tait Communications invests around 12% of revenue, above and beyond the WRC funding, into research and development. The company has an annual turnover in excess of US$170m.