Czech radars from Meteopress crush the competition with technology and price – Seznam Právy

You can also listen to the interview in the audio version.

Meteopress sold weather data to media houses in the 1990s. Interest in them waned after 2000, and with the margins the company took. So they had to find another way to apply it to the market. They found her.

“We started with radars 15 years ago because we had hard-to-find data in the places we needed it. When I wrote to our current competitors asking if they would sell me weather data, half of them didn’t answer me and the other half laughed at me saying, when I have two or three million dollars to the project, that I should contact me. ,” he says in Agenda SZ Byznys the head of the company Michal Najman.

However, Meteopress did not take this route. Instead of buying data from foreign radars, he developed his own device, and their technology, according to Najman, was able to “hack” using the ship’s version of this device. As a result of additional months of development, they developed the world’s first Solid-State radar, which the head of Meteopress says is the technology of the future for weather measurement.

“It was a technological revolution. Classically, magnetron radars are used based on technology from the 1930s. Solid-State is the radar of the future and we have the advantage of being at the forefront of development right now. We have our own AI team that can adjust humanity’s experience of artificial intelligence according to the weather. We also use technologies from other sectors such as defense or aviation. We are changing them in our industry and we have the advantage of being the first to think about how to do it,” Najman explains.

Solid-state radars provide better quality data to Meteopress than their classic magnetron counterparts, which are common in the world. According to the company’s data, the devices built on the Czech company’s technology are light and easy to move. The production and installation also cost much less than magnetron ones. This factor was paradoxically a disadvantage for Najman when he started offering radars to clients.

“At first, we focused on radars suitable for installation in Europe. According to the price expected by the customer, these should have cost around a million euros. Our first radar cost around 400 thousand euros and the clients told us it must be wrong. I increased the price to 600 thousand and it was still not enough. Then I raised the price to 800,000 and the clients were already satisfied. My costs have not increased,” said the owner of Meteopress.

In the case of a Czech company, the price including the installation is around 1.5 million dollars, equivalent to 34.5 million crowns. For the competition, it is about two to three million dollars.