Promethean's whiteboard leader Jean-Yves Charlier with a lesson on how to succeed

Chris Blackhurst
3 Feb 2010

One of the pleasures of this job is occasionally meeting people who are altering for the better the way we live. It doesn't happen that often, granted. It's also one of the frustrations as I'm left wondering why didn't I think of that?

Such a person is Jean-Yves Charlier, chief executive of Promethean, which makes interactive whiteboards for classrooms. Before we get lost on a nostalgia trip back to blackboards and our own schooldays, and how kids today are swamped with technology, consider this: the teacher spent a large amount of time with his or her back to the pupils; we sat there for an age while they wrote something in chalk; and then we couldn't read their writing.

They'd also ask us a question, telling us to put up our hands if we knew the answer. The same hands would shoot upward, so only a few ever got a look-in — and nobody had any idea if the silent remainder knew anything or not.

All that is removed by Promethean. Its electronic whiteboards are instant, colourful and dynamic. Pupils use hand-held devices to key in their answers. The teacher can immediately see who is right and who is wrong. They can show educational videos and run software programmes. It's clever and quick, and light years from how we were.

“Around 70% of classrooms in the UK use interactive whiteboards,” says Charlier. He's brimming with facts and figures, all of them positive — which makes a welcome change. It's good to report, too, that Promethean is British. And it may well float on the stock market, with a value of between £400 million and £500 million, in the near future.

If Promethean is to prosper, it needs to look beyond these shores. In the US, for instance, only a quarter of classes have whiteboards. Demand is surging, but the British company faces a challenge from the other main supplier, Canadian rival Smart Technologies.

Which is where, in choosing Charlier, Promethean may have displayed a certain intelligence. I've lost track of the UK firms I've encountered that have told me blind they're going to conquer the universe, only to come up against international opposition and fizzle out.

Charlier is unplaceable. He's 46, Belgian, spent much of his childhood in Wisconsin (his father was an executive for General Electric) and he sounds American. Prior to joining Promethean in 2007, he ran Colt Telecom. He was put in there by Fidelity, its majority shareholder. Before that, he was chief of operations for BT Global Services, responsible for operations in continental Europe. Previously, he was in charge of marketing and sales at Equant, the global telecoms network provider, and a vice-president at Wang.

He has a BA from the American College in Paris and an MBA from Wharton Business School. In other words, if you were looking to take on the world with your hi-tech product, Charlier would fit the bill. The fact he lives in Brussels with his family and commutes to Promethean's headquarters in Blackburn and to China, where its products are made, and to offices in the US, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Bahrain, Germany and France, and wherever else he's required for meetings, adds to the transnational flavour.

After turning round Colt from losses of €200 million to profit, Charlier went back to Fidelity. “I'd finished restructuring Colt for Fidelity, and I was looking at new investment areas,” he says. “Education was at the forefront of my thoughts — I realised there needed to be a significant transformation in classrooms across the world if education was to take advantage of technological advances.” Education is also, as he never tires of telling, one of the world's three biggest consumers of public money, with healthcare and defence.

As it happened, in the way these things frequently do, Graham Howe, a co-founder of Orange who guided the mobile operator's London and Paris flotation in 2000 and who knew Charlier from telecoms days, got in touch. Howe, chairman of Promethean since 2005, was looking for a CEO. Charlier went to visit a school with him in London and saw what was being offered: “I could see immediately the impact of whiteboards. Most schools were set up 100 years ago and are in old buildings, but that doesn't stop them having 21st-century teaching equipment.”

Promethean — after Prometheus, who Greek myth says stole fire from the gods and gave to it mankind — was founded in 1996 by Tony Cann, who still has 50% of the business. Cann was a serial electronics entrepreneur and inventor, mostly applying camera and visualiser technology to industries such as architecture. “Tony thought education could benefit from what he was doing,” says Charlier. “He's got a daughter who is a teacher and he worked on a design for a new electronic type of blackboard.”

In 1999, Cann launched the whiteboard in the UK and sold a few to schools. By 2004, enough had been shifted for the Government to be interested and to realise their potential. It made a grant of £50 million available to explore the deployment of interactive technology in the classroom.

Apax Partners, the London private-equity group, invested in both Promethean and Smart Technologies. Apax, which has 25% of Promethean and 49% of Smart, is on to a winner: Promethean's revenues are likely to rise from £150 million in 2008 to £200 million this year; and Smart's are expected to grow by a third from $430 million in the year to March 2009. The latter is also considering an IPO, so expect to hear and read much more about whiteboards in the coming months.

Between them, the two companies have 75% of the market — Hitachi trails a poor third. Each whiteboard costs about £2500, and the handsets £60 each. This cost is minimal, Charlier insists, when spread over time. “In Europe, the average spend per child per day on education is €42. You put these in, and over five years the cost is less than 1% of the overall spend.”

And, he says, they represent better value than a laptop for every pupil: “Laptops don't interact with the teacher, they don't engage the child, and there are control and theft issues associated with them.”

Promethean has gone on to create its popular Promethean Planet digital platform for teachers, which enables them to share their materials, and cuts down on preparation time.

“Imagine you're teaching dinosaurs, you can see what other teachers have done and if you like it, use it. What we're not doing is putting computers in classrooms and taking teachers out of them. Neither are we about students working on their own. What we're doing is empowering teachers, giving them better content.” It's no coincidence, he says, that “one-third of Promethean's 900-plus employees are ex-teachers and educators”.

From being “a UK company with 85% of its business in the UK five years ago, Promethean now has over 80% of its business outside the UK”. I don't write that very much. Or the next bit: “We've sailed through this recession.”

Alas, if only I'd thought of it.

LIFE AND TIMES OF JEAN-YVES CHARLIER

Born: 1963
Education: American College in Paris (BA), Wharton (MBA)
First job: graduate trainee, Wang
Key moves: vice-president, Wang; president, marketing and sales, Equant; chief of operations for BT Global Services; managing director Fidelity International; chief executive Colt Telecom; CEO of Promethean
Hobbies: cycling, skiing