Wasserman keeps eye on future in CEO role

FORT COLLINS — Yuval Wasserman, CEO of Advanced Energy Industries Inc., talks about “big data” and “next generation of operations” and “relentless investment in innovation.”

It’s all part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, he said. The steam engine begat the first Industrial Revolution. This one, the one in which Advanced Energy is a pre-eminent operator, supplier and developer of technology, is about the speed of data and producing the equipment that can generate, process, analyze, consume and transmit data. AE touches all of that, and more.

“Take your cell phone,” he said. “Every piece — the chips, the thin-film materials in the screen and case, every component is affected by our power supplies,” he said.

“What we do [at AE] is enable development of this technology. And the demand for products continues to grow.” AE has customers in the medical-equipment industry, life sciences, aerospace, defense and others.

“Did you know that 90 percent of all the data in the world was generated in the last two years,” he asked.

Wasserman has led Advanced Energy since October 2014. He joined the company in August 2007 as senior vice president of sales and marketing. He moved up the ranks to executive vice president, chief operating officer, president and then CEO.

A chemical engineer by training from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, he has worked in the semiconductor industry his whole career. He joined AE after serving as president and CEO of Tevet Process Control Technologies, a startup.

AE, now 39 years old, “feels like a startup” in terms of the pace of activity, he said.

And while Wasserman is fully involved in issues the Fort Collins company faces today, he keeps one eye on what the company will be doing 10 years from now.

That’s why AE is engaged “in a relentless investment in innovation, in research and development. That’s why we support colleges and universities,” he told BizWest in an interview.

AE is a leading investor in the new Front Range Community College Center for Integrated Manufacturing, which is being developed in Longmont to educate the next generation of manufacturing technicians. AE donated $200,000 to the cause and helped to write the curriculum for the coursework.

AE also participates in programs at Colorado State University and other institutions near its 20 sites around the world. It hopes that its relationships with educational institutions result in a pipeline of future employees to join the 2,500 who currently work for the company.

“There’s a scarcity of talent. We want to help people study power electronics and make sure we have the new engineers coming out of schools.”

He referenced a program of SEMI, a global association of semiconductor companies, that attempts to inculcate STEM education beginning in the first grade.

AE recently announced that it would open an administrative office in Denver but maintain its headquarters in Fort Collins.

“We ran out of space in Fort Collins. Many on our management team are traveling 70 percent of the time. It made sense to move general and administrative offices closer to the airport, closer to the law firms that we use, to the CPA firms we use,” he said. Wasserman will maintain an office in Fort Collins as well as Denver, although his travel schedule takes him out of the office frequently. “I had 300,000 miles just on United last year,” he said.

The Denver decision enables the Fort Collins plant to “absorb more talent and continue to be our center of innovation.” The company will maintain and expand in its current location, he said, and is not looking to build a new Fort Collins campus.

AE is also actively seeking additional acquisitions as part of its growth strategy. The company acquired four companies in the past 18 months, he said. Those acquisitions, as well as continued product development, has resulted in an 18 percent annual growth rate, “which is faster than the markets that we serve,” he said.

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