UnaBiz CTO: Massive NICIGAS Project Came Down to a Mindset

For Unabiz co -founder Philippe Chiu, a successful project comes down to reality check. What are your skill sets and what are you capable of delivering? Only then can you drive deeper collaboration with your team and stronger partnerships with vendors who can make up for where you're lacking. It's a strategy that came to be on display. in the Nichi Gas project. Nichi Gas is the second largest distributor of gas in Japan, serving more than 1.6 million customers. It's now capable of real-time gas meter readings thanks to this spaceship-like device, which also happens to be a network control unit. It was developed by Unibiz along with a team of Taiwanese engineers. Nichi Gas has deployed nearly 900,000 of these devices. existing gas meters. They transmit gas consumption data from the meter to an IOT platform developed in partnership with Suracom. They use a Japan -wide Sigfox network to do it. It's a triangle of collaboration that represents an evolving business model for Unibiz, one that's starkly different from how it started just five years ago when it was a Sigfox network operator specializing and low-cost connectivity. now prioritizes custom -designed IoT solutions and it's paying off. Let's pass it on to Philippe Chu, who's here to give us a reality check on Gas 2.0. Nichigas is an industry that is very traditional, but Nichigas has a bigger dream and they've designed a whole plan to modernize how gas is produced, how gas is filled. into the gas bottles and how these are distributed across the customer household, and how they collect the invoices, the gas meter value. So what did we do for them? We did for them the automatic reading part. So we have upgraded their current gas meter in Tokyo. So if you have the chance to go to Tokyo, you'll see in the back alley, close to next to the gas meter, what we call an NCU a network control unit and this unit allows to do some operation like reading the meter information or in case of incident you can shut down the the gas meter the gas valve or you open it remotely and this allows a much smoother operation as you know gas is one time a month you get the gas value but now in each you guys is able to have a live view of the gas consumption. The challenge for us is we are an IoT startup. Nichigas didn't find any solution on the market to do this action. Actually, this is wrong. They found some solution that can do that. But those were five times more expensive than what they have in budget. So they asked us to help them design a custom hardware, a custom device that we need. not only just do the feature, but it will also look like a very nice product. And as of now, we used the expertise of Taiwan to build that solution and to ship that to Japan. In less than a year, a year and a half, they've deployed close to one million of these devices. And right now... Nietzsche Gas is getting ready, as they get more mature in the solution, to resell this solution to other gas operators. So it's not only for them. Now they have found that revolution. They want to share it with more gas operators. But more than that, by doing this project, we figure out there is a bigger trend happening. There is a very attention now. how we use the natural resources water gas you know it's a there is a lot of drought issue striking Taiwan it rains a lot but there's also a lack of water so there is a need of finding ways to better use those resources and what I can work at what I can say is that it took us two years to get right or mindset to optimize every single smaller aspect to reduce the cost of deployment, the cost of the device, the cost of logistics, the cost of installation and this is a mindset we have been pushing to the whole team. Once this is right, by working with very large companies we're able to achieve an unprecedented IoT project. Now Nietzsche Gas has also deployed an LTE-M based device. also developed by Unibiz to address the geographical gaps left behind by the Sigfox network. It's estimated this will cover about the remaining 5 percent of network coverage deployments began in 2021. For more coverage on Unibiz and the smart gas market, be sure to stick with Current Insights and if you have a question on this story, be sure to hit the button below.