A SCOTS entrepreneur believes that there needs to be more engagement between industry and the government to encourage young people, especially women, to consider a career in telecommunications engineering.

Tommy Cook, chief executive of Linlithgow-based Calnex Solutions – the first Scottish company for two years to float on the AIM (Alternative Investment Market) in October 2020 – admitted that the firm would not have experienced over the last three years if it had not been in position to hire people from overseas.

“When people talk about ‘engineering’ they think we’re running around with hammers and spanners and hitting things,” he said.

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While accepting that Scotland’s universities were producing talented people, he conceded that the talent pool is “not big enough”. “We would not have grown without the ability to bring people in from places like Turkey and India – all over the world,” Mr Cook noted. “And another big problem is that there is not enough rented accommodation in this country.”

Calnex, founded in 2006 by Mr Cook, a farmer’s son from south-west Scotland, specialises in the design, production and marketing of test instrumentation and solutions for the telecoms industry.

A former senior manager at Hewlett-Packard in South Queensferry, coming up through the test and measurement division, Mr Cook described HP as a place that “really understood” how to build a culture and a team, elements which he has aimed to emulate within Calnex.

But he said his latter years with the firm were more difficult, following the incorporation of HP’s testing and measurement business into Agilent – the largest IPO in the history of Silicon Valley at that time.

With the subsequent collapse of the dot-com bubble that took a swathe of investment out of the tech and communications sectors, in 2005 he found himself made redundant.

Setting up Calnex with his redundancy money then funding from Scottish Enterprise, encouraged by his mentor, the late Campbell Murray who was a member of the high-growth team supporting start-ups at SE, he gradually grew the business to achieve its £42 million listing on the AIM.

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Creating high-value, low-volume products that provide solutions for customers all over the world, Calnex now employs about 160 people in Linlithgow, Belfast, Stevenage, and in the USA, India and China.

“Scotland only accounts for about 3% of our business and, in fact, only last year we managed to sell in Scotland – I got quite excited about that,” said Mr Cook.

“Telecoms is very a global market so why set up business in Scotland? I say ‘why not’ – this is a great place to be and all you need is to be near talented people.”