Metro concentrates on outsourcing

As the local IT trend is towards outsourcing, the company had to catch up with this market, said executive director Bodin Parapagpenjun.

The company will also establish outsourcing functions under its Solution Integration Group to provide outsourcing infrastructure services to its customers. Bodin said the outsourcing service would cover items such as servers, networking, security systems as well as data centres.

"With this service, businesses can leave their IT tasks alone and allow us to take care of them, so they can focus on their core activities instead," he said. The company planned to talk with customers to learn their requirements for IT infrastructure, then it will invest in the whole system and charge customers a monthly fee to use it, he said.

The service also includes all the system's management tasks and staff. This, he added, would help customers save on the cost of IT investment and eliminate problems when it comes to maintenance, while they could also keep up with the latest technology.

The company plans to provide a full range of outsourcing services this year, hoping to gain around Bt100 million to Bt200 million of revenue in the first year.

"We believe this area will grow rapidly and the revenue from the service will reach at least Bt400 million a year in the next three years," he said. Initial target customers will be multinational companies.

Bodin said the company's key strategy for the new services would focus on existing customers. According to a company survey, around 79 per cent of its customer base is repeat customers and this group generates around 94 per cent of the company's total revenue.

The company's executive director Narong Charuvajana also said that apart from expanding to outsourcing, increasing the company's registered capital would support the expansion of hardware and software product lines, the development of networking infrastructure, as well as the development of new emerging business related to the radio frequency identification system.

He said the company would grow by at least 10 per cent this year. Metro Systems last year generated around Bt5.7 billion of revenue, growing 10.4 per cent from the previous year when it gained Bt5.34 billion.

Of the total revenue, the enterprise-system group, which is responsible for all levels of IT hardware products, accounted for 50 per cent of revenue, while the office-supplies group, overseeing printers and peripheral products, generated 36 per cent of total revenue.

The integration group, which takes care of software, system integration and professional services, accounted for 8 per cent and the networking group generated 4 per cent of total revenue, with the remainder from other areas.

Hardware products, however, still accounted for the highest revenue proportion at 47 per cent, while office-supply products were 35 per cent and software and services 17 per cent.

Narong said the expansion plan to software and services would help the company reach a growth rate of 10 per cent this year.

Pongpen Sutharoj

The Nation