From a newspaper clipping to the Middle East’s biggest shipyards – Sami’s 30-year journey at Cadmatic
Building a long-term sales career often comes down to one unexpected phone call. In the mid-1990s, Sami Koponen cut out a job advertisement from a Finnish newspaper and kept it. He never applied for the role. Someone called him. That call changed the direction of his career entirely, and he has been at Cadmatic ever since.
An engineer who wanted to keep moving
Sami trained as a naval architect and spent his first three years working on ship projects at Elomatic Marine, a company closely linked to Cadmatic at the time. He was designing engine rooms, using Cadmatic software alongside other tools, and doing work he found interesting enough. But he already knew himself well enough to sense that he would not stay in one place forever.
“I have always drifted forward,” he says. “After five or six years, I feel I have seen what there is to see in a role, and I need something new.“
When Cadmatic called and asked if he would consider moving into customer support and training, he said yes without overthinking it. The role sounded interesting, the company was familiar, and he trusted that curiosity alone was reason enough.
What he did not expect was how much that first step would open up over the following decades.
Learning to sell in a country he had never visited
For much of the 2000s, Sami handled sales across Europe, covering markets in Norway, Italy, and Eastern Europe. He also worked on sales cases in Vietnam, China, and Brazil. Each market taught him something the previous one had not.
Then, in 2010, his manager handed him a plane ticket to the UAE and told him to go build a business there.
“We had some plans and had started exploring the market,” Sami recalls. “But we were starting from zero.”
The region was unlike anything he had encountered before. The working week ran Sunday to Thursday in the UAE and Saturday to Wednesday in Saudi Arabia, which meant that maintaining relationships across both markets while also managing European responsibilities left almost no room for anything else. He describes those years simply: he worked 110 percent for five to six years straight.
But the approach he brought to it turned out to be exactly what the market responded to. No grand gestures, no overselling. He made commitments and kept them. When a customer had a problem, he solved it. When he said something would happen, it happened.
“The pragmatic Finnish way of operating turned out to travel very well,” Sami says.
By 2015, five of the six marine and offshore companies he had identified as potential customers in Dubai in 2010 had become Cadmatic clients, joined by several other customers from the region. The business Sami and his colleagues built during those years grew from nothing to several million in annual revenue.
“There are no quick wins there,” he says. “You warm it up over many years. They had seen how we treated them compared to how we treated others. That counted for a lot.”
What a 30-year sales career at Cadmatic looks like
Sami does not have a romanticized answer to why he stayed. He stayed because the work kept changing and the company kept growing, which meant there was always a next challenge to take on rather than a ceiling to push against.
He has gone from customer trainer to sales manager to regional lead, from Scandinavia to the Gulf, from small license deals to nine-figure contracts. Each shift came not because he pushed for a new title, but because the company was expanding into territory that matched where his own curiosity was pointing.
“If you are someone who gets restless when you have been doing the same thing for too long, this is the kind of place where that restlessness can actually take you somewhere,” he says.
He is currently back working in the Middle East, with open positions in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, building a team to sustain and grow what he started more than 15 years ago.
His advice to experienced professionals considering Cadmatic is direct: if you want a company where growth creates real room for people who want to move, this is worth your serious consideration.