Three questions for ...
Jean-Paul Chevée
Member of the Management Board - Director of International Development
The SII Group posted revenue from international operations of close to 28 million euros for the year ended March 31, 2010, or ten times more than only two years ago. This growth reflects SII’s firm intent to expand beyond France, the traditional base of its business. What brought about this change of strategy ?
J.P Chevée : Our strategy hasn’t changed. Foreign expansion is not the ultimate objective. What we want to do is continue supporting our clients’ projects, and today those clients are mainly European corporations with international projects. Thus, it simply makes sense for SII to have expanded abroad in response to our clients’ demands for geographic proximity and offshore outsourcing capacity.
In doing so we took an approach that was unusual for SII, in that we opted for growth through acquisitions. It started with our purchase of Coris in Switzerland, then the Concatel group of companies in Spain, and finally the acquisition of Aida Development in Germany. We save time by using this approach, of course, especially in mature markets, but it’s also a way to broaden our line of services. With Concatel, for instance, we have acquired resources in enterprise content management and infrastructure management software. As for our German colleagues, they bring with them considerable skills in aeronautical design.
You mentioned offshore outsourcing. Can you be more specific ?
J.P Chevée : Of course. We currently have offshore outsourcing capacity in four countries: Morocco, Argentina, Romania and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Poland. Incidentally, in our case, they’re not so much offshore as nearshore facilities, as all except Argentina are less than three hours from Paris by air !
Merely having facilities in Morocco or Argentina isn’t sufficient to do offshore outsourcing, which is a business in its own right. We have been relying on our extensive experience in project management – SII is ISO 9001 and CMMi3 certified for all of its packaged services – to develop a specific methodology for offshore projects. The approach is based on both SII and the offshore facility leading the project while communicating with each other on a permanent basis, so that the home teams work closely with the local staff. For our clients, this means continuing to deal with their usual SII representative, while for us it means the possibility of guaranteeing the quality of the services performed.
Do you believe that you can continue expanding internationally at the same pace
in the future ?
J.P Chevée : That’s not our goal. We are of course prepared to examine any opportunity that comes up, but we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves. At this stage, we are focusing our attention on integrating the companies acquired in recent months. The acquisitions have given rise to considerable potential synergies within the Group. We must take advantage of those before we consider additional foreign operations.