Quarterly Report by the CEO – Gregoire Nitot
In the end of May, we hosted the annual Sii Managers Weekend, attended by all managers and key business people from all branches. This year, the meeting was attended by 200 people.
The weekend provides an opportunity to take stock of the financial year and make plans for the one ahead, as well as to present special awards for the work performed in the past year. The most important award is the Best Sii Branch in Poland. This year the prize went to Gdańsk, however, it was a difficult decision. Looking at results: profit and revenue, both branches, Gdańsk and Wrocław, had very good results.
However, I decided to give the award to Gdańsk, considering the fact that they provide the most advanced services and utilize more models of cooperation: staffing, Team Leasing, projects, turnkey solutions and Managed Services. Gdańsk cooperates closely with our Presales & Delivery Department and practices. What’s more, despite the decline in co-operation with two clients, Gdańsk managed to sustain its pace of growth, acquiring new clients and developing cooperation with the existing ones.
Congratulations to both branches: Gdańsk and Wrocław, for a great performance! Especially since you also implement other objectives of Sii – Wrocław took home the awards for the Best Sales Representative and the Best Administration Department, Gdańsk – for the best Recruitment Department, Employer Branding and Mission Implementation. I congratulate all those who received awards (read more>>).
I congratulate also to all managers and engineers in Lublin, Kraków, Katowice, Poznań, Łódź and Warszawa. Every branch had good results last year and realised our mission with success (Power People – identify and promote the best people) and strived for gaining 5 main goals of Sii (profit, clients’ and employees’ satisfaction, development and being better than competitors and fun).
In the last quarter, we also adopted a new budget for the next financial year, which starts in Sii on 1st April and ends on 31st March. We plan to increase our income to 300 mln PLN according to very good perspective of cooperation development with most of our clients. The year 2015/2016 is going to be finished with profit before tax at 8% – instead of 10% last year. Reduction in profit is due to the change in wages: engineers earn increasingly more, while the price of projects is often difficult to negotiate with clients – in effect, Sii’s margin has declined. The second reason are Sii investments in PSD, practices and internal IT. We will continue to strongly develop our practices as well as centralized PSD and the PMO departments. These are multi-million investments necessary for Sii to become an increasingly better and more reliable supplier.
We will still develop internal IT department – the example is new implemented SiiPortal, which we have been working on since 18 months, developing it on SharePoint platform. I hope all Power People will like it. Implementation of these investments is our main challenge.
Another involves development of the Public Department at Sii. We want to acquire more projects in the public sector. This cake is big – we hope for many fascinating projects.
At the same time, we strive to minimize the risks associated with such projects – as a standard the risk is very high and lay only at suplier side. For example, penalties for every day of delay are very high, there is no possibility of withdrawing from a contract and the is a lack of any responsibility at client’s side. Public sector institutions are not fair while writing contracts. In my opinion they don’t try do build a long-term-relationship, based on win-win rule, to have the best IT system or application. They just don’t want to bear any risk. They do not understand the supplier has to generate a profit, and in a real partnership we strive to minimize financial risk of supplier.
Moreover, working for public sector characterized with huge bureaucracy in every public tender, growing legal costs and big investments in pre-sales. Often the cooperation ends in court, where we go to prove our client that we have the best offer. Strengthening our position in the public sector is a major challenge we wish to overcome.
On the turn of June and July there was an important occurrence: we welcomed in Sii team over 40 consultants of company from Orange Group. In accordance to that we plan to develop our cooperation with Orange and set a new training practice in Sii, which will be selling IT trainings in Poland. We will come with detailed information very soon. We welcome all new employees onboard and wish you great careers in Sii!
I wish you success in the implementation of new projects. Congratulations for those already won, especially the two new prestigious clients from Germany and Ireland.
Gregoire Nitot
CEO
