EuroBusiness Media (EBM): Altran, global leader in innovation and high-tech engineering consulting is announcing its full-year results and I have the pleasure of discussing them today with the company’s chairman and CEO, Dominique Cerutti, hello. First of all, you are announcing these end-of-year results, give us an idea of the highlights of the year.
Dominique Cerutti: It’s another great year in terms of results; solid results. We are growing our top line by 10.7%, we extending the EBIT by 13%, the net income by 22%, the free cash flow is now 4.7% of the revenue, so that’s another very solid year. And we have finished the year with 26,000 employees, most of them being young, talented engineers. So that was a great, solid year.
EBM: Last time we met, you were announcing your new strategic plan, “Altran 2020. Ignition”. Tell us where things are now, six months on?
Dominique Cerutti: You remember that we said that in Ignition, our strategic plan, we have four pillars. One is Augmented Value, another one is Industrial GlobalShore, the third one is Geographical Expansion and the fourth one is Operational Excellence. Just to give you a flash of what we have done in the last 5-6 months of execution, on Augmented Value we have now 5 World Class Centers, domains of expertise, Passive safety, Internet of Things, Network, industrial analytics and Life Sciences process excellence and those world class centres are up and running and very promising, we’re signing the first deals with clients and that’s great news. By the way, we completed in December the acquisition of a company called Tessella to create the data analytics work center. It was a nice acquisition; 250 tip-top PhDs joining us to do that. So that’s great progress and it’s resonating very well with clients. On the GlobalShore front, same story, we are pressing on, we could win a deal which we call a transformational deal with Nokia, it’s not only a great deal with this great client, but it’s also helping us to build up our capabilities in India and we are now 1600 people in India – you remember that at the beginning of 2015 we were 500 - so that’s moving in the right direction with an acceleration to come. And we’re signing other deals – another one that I could mention is with Jaguar Land Rover, which is a co-innovation deal where we co-invest to create the future platform of electronisation of cars. So all that is great news. I’m really delighted with the speed of execution of my team. And the last thing is, we have tested the plan with many clients since we announced it in November, it is resonating very, very, very well. The clients are challenging us but encouraging us to press on, and that’s what we do.
EBM: Looking ahead now, what can we expect for 2016?
Dominique Cerutti: Same story. We are going to press on on Ignition. I think the vision we articulated was very well done by the team. Nothing to change. It’s about execution, execution and execution. So we have five World Class Centres up and running. By the end of the year we will have ten World Class Centres. We expect significant client deals and margin extension from those World Class Centres. Same story on the front of what we call GlobalShore. We have now round 2700 people in the near shore/offshore centres. We hope we will finish the year with several thousands. So it means acquisition and execution for deals with clients and on the front of the Geo Expansion, we are focusing - if you remember – on the USA where we have significant plans of expansion, leveraging the foliage company that we acquired two years ago there and same story in Germany and Asia, that’s what we are going to do in 2016, the year looks very promising. If we can combine the very solid result that we have and the financial and operational discipline that we have now in Altran and the sharp execution of this plan, I think that the sky’s the limit for our group and more importantly for our clients.
EBM: Dominique Cerutti, thank you very much indeed.
Dominique Cerutti: Thank you very much.
