The phone's to his ear: Skip Speaks oversees Kyocera Wireless' steady growth in the competitive cell phone market

San Diego Business Journal, Nov 11, 2002 by Mike Allen

Call Skip Speaks crazy; he won't be offended.

Speaks, president and CEO of Kyocera Wireless Corp. based in San Diego, is a bona fide cell phone addict. His cell is always on, even while on vacation.

"Sometimes I wish I had what it takes to turn my phone off. My phone is on seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and has been for the last 15 years," says Speaks, the president and CEO for the Japanese-owned subsidiary of Kyocera Corp. "I can't remember the last time my phone was turned off."

While it doens't have the brand name or market share of Nokia, Motorola or Ericsson, the cell phones made at Kyocera's La Jolla plant are gaining a foothold. As of the second quarter, Kyocera is the fourth-largest maker of all cell phones in North America, and has 2 1/2 percent share of the global market.

For phones using CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access, the wireless technology pioneered by Qualcomm Inc.) Kyocera Wireless is now the top cell phone manufacturer in North America, according to Gartner/Dataquest.

Record Sales Expected

This year, Kyocera Wireless, with more than 3,000 employees, is expected to produce about 10 million handsets and record sales of about $1.2 billion, compared to sales of about $1 billion in 2001, Speaks said.

"We're probably the best-kept secret in San Diego," Speaks says. "The handsets we build are used as standards of reference by some of the carriers in the United States.

"Technically, we're quite strong, but we're not strong from a brand perspective, so we're working on that."

Speaks took the job as Kyocera's president and chief operating office last September, and was named CEO in July after former CEO Masahiro Inoue returned to Japan for another assignment within Kyocera.

Before taking the job, Speaks had compiled some two decades in the telecommunications industry, including a 15year stint at Ericsson's North American division, where he oversaw some 3,000 employees.

He also served as president and CEO for an Orlando telecom startup, Triton Network Systems, which he led through a successful initial public offering in July 2000.

Triton's product, equipment that provided for the wireless transmission of large amounts of data, also known as broadband, was based on technology developed for defense purposes by Lockheed Martin Corp.

The technology was impressive and permitted massive downloads of data from the Internet in seconds. The problem was nobody really needed it; the existing infrastructure met the needs of most customers, Speaks said.

When Triton went IPO, it raised nearly $95 million, which followed venture capital investment of about $100 million. The stock that went out at $15 rose to the high $40s, resulting in a market cap of more than $1.4 billion.

Shortly after, the Internet bubble blew up, sending practically the entire tech sector into a steep tailspin.

"All of our customers, except one, declared Chapter 11 and stopped buying, of course."

When the company's eventual demise became evident in 2001, Speaks convinced the board to shut down the company rather than continue burning investors' money.

Speaks said while at Triton he went through practically every human emotion, putting in long hours to launch the company and take it public, only to see all the hard work result in failure.

He recalled checking off a plan of action list soon after the IPO went out.

"I was sitting there with my engineering vice president, making my checklist on what we had to execute and what we had to do to maintain our credibility. We had a very concise list of things that had to happen. We didn't have on there, 'Avoid market meltdown."'

A self-described Type A personality, Speaks says he's driven to succeed.

"Part of it is the feedback loop. You do things, they work, people notice and say that was good," he says. "I kind of feed on that."

Early Business Career

An only child who grew up in Leesburg, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C., Speaks was introduced to the world of work at an early age by his dad, a high-energy entrepreneur.

"His primary business was construction, of highways, buildings, and subdivisions," he says. "He bored easily. We had an asphalt plant, the local Texaco franchise, the grocery store, the cemetery with perpetual care, a housing development, a local golf course, a trucking company. He never knew what he wanted so he just did it all."

"I ran a bulldozer when I was 12," he says. "When I was in high school, I would start up (all the machinery at) the asphalt plant."

Speaks freely calls his childhood "wacky" but he also had fun in Little League baseball, swimming and playing trombone in all the school bands. On the track team, he was a pole-vaulter.

After earning a degree in civil engineering from West Virginia Institute of Technology, Speaks worked for a short time with the Virginia Highway Department before returning to work for his dad, helping construct a housing development and golf course.

He later took jobs as a program manager for a federal program determining the new nautical boundary of the United States, and as chief engineer for Berkeley County in West Virginia.