Smart City Expo World Congress Barcelona 2024

I’m Werner de Wolf from Schréder It has been great to be here in Smart City Show in Barcelona for the last few days.
It has been a pleasure for us to participate in the Smart Deal by Kurrant.
We are Schréder, we are a Belgium headquartered global player in lighting of public spaces.
So all what we do is about providing more safety, providing more comfort for people living in public spaces and through a very sustainable way.
As we are, company active in public lighting, we really believe there is a massive, advantage of using, the light bulbs which are around the world, which are every 50, 60m, I think almost 250 million of them in Europe, they are all, let's say powered, they are maintained, they are at elevation.
So they provide a great asset to add additional functions beyond lighting.
And, in our strategy, we indeed see it growing from lighting into smart lighting and from smart lighting into smart city.
And the reason we are here, is indeed to discover, new technologies, innovative ideas from startups, scale ups from all over the world to help and stimulate them also, to give back and to help them grow.
But in the end, to indeed see how we can further evolve the company from a smart lighting company is a smart city company.
I see a lot of people speaking about technology, and I think it's good , its great.
But I think I would recommend them also look at your use cases and make sure that what you are doing is indeed really helping the city become smarter and give them a return on investment, which can be monetary or socially doesn't matter.
To make sure that indeed you are not just looking at technology, but looking at use cases that help cities to become, smarter and and better, number one.
Number two, be laser focused.
I mean, we still see too many people doing lots of different use cases.
It's very hard to be the best in one thing.
It's almost impossible to the best in too many things.
So clear focus, I think, is another recommendation from us to the startups.
Be laser sharp on what you do, it's better to be the best in a small area, Then to be the medium player into, two broad areas.