Amber Group, the global technology company founded and headquartered in Kingston, today announced that its hardware division, Amber IoT, has manufactured, sold and deployed more than one million devices in Africa.

The milestone makes the Jamaican-owned group one of the Caribbean’s most successful technology exporters, with products designed by its own engineers now woven into the daily operations of utilities, logistics firms, retailers, and security companies across Africa.

The devices belong to a fast-growing field called the Internet of Things, or IoT. The idea is simple: put a small, inexpensive computer chip inside everyday equipment so that the equipment can report on itself, automatically, from wherever it is.

Picture an electricity meter that sends its own reading straight to the utility company, so no meter reader ever has to visit the yard; connect it to street lights, and it gives it remote access to turn it on or off. A delivery truck that tells the depot exactly where it is at all times. A supermarket freezer that raises an alarm the moment its temperature starts to climb, before the chicken and fish inside spoil. A warehouse or container door that messages a security company the instant it is forced open.

Each of these is an IoT device at work, and Amber has now put more than a million of them into service in Africa alone. Amber IoT’s product line covers smart electricity and water metering (Amber Pulse), vehicle and asset tracking, panic button, remote security monitoring (Amber Guard), cold-chain monitoring that keeps food and medicine at safe temperatures from factory to shelf (Amber Temp and DryLink), street lights automation and many other industrial automations. The devices also communicate over 0G network — a wireless network built specifically for small devices that need to send short messages while sipping very little battery power, with some devices running for years on a single charge.

Built by Amber, top to bottom

Many technology firms buy generic hardware from third-party factories and simply put their name on it. Amber took the harder road. Every device that carries the Amber name is designed in-house, by Amber’s own hardware and firmware engineers; manufactured at Amber IoT’s specialised vendor facility in South Africa; and run on Amber’s own software, connecting into the group’s proprietary cloud and AI management platforms.

“Africa was never a test market for us. It is one of the most demanding operating environments in the world, and the technology that survives here is the technology worth taking anywhere. Crossing a million devices means our engineering has been validated by the toughest customers we have. This incredible milestone belongs to our hardware engineers, who designed every board and every enclosure in these devices themselves. I want to thank them personally,” said Gideon Vorster, Managing Director, Amber Group, Africa.

While Kingston remains the group’s executive headquarters and creative centre, most of Amber Group’s revenue is earned in overseas markets, with Africa serving as one of the primary bases for its IoT division. Those foreign earnings are a financial engine for the company’s work at home: they help fund national technology programmes including the Amber HEART Academy, which trains thousands of young Jamaicans in software development at no cost to the trainee, and the Amber National AI Lab, among many other large national initiatives Amber funds.