Comptel’s Strong Start for 2015!

Posted: April 24th, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: News | Tags: , , , , | Comments Off on Comptel’s Strong Start for 2015!

Comptel’s net sales and profit grew significantly during the first quarter of 2015, which continued the trend from the second half of 2014. Our European operations especially continued strong sales in Q1. Our FlowOne Fulfillment solution continued, as in the last year, to be our main growth driver.

We were also awarded a deal with a new customer in Indonesia, together with our strategic partner, Tech Mahindra. Strategically, this was an important deal, as Indonesia is defined in our strategy as one of our target growth markets. Our backlog continued to be strong with a 32.3% increase compared to the previous year.

In Q1, we invested in development areas as defined in our updated strategy. Despite our investments, profitability continued to improve, and our operating results grew 55.7% year over year. During the first quarter, we secured three significant orders, valued over EUR 0.5 million. A few Q1 forecasted orders were delayed to the beginning of Q2.

Business Review of Q1 2015

Comptel’s net sales increased in the first quarter by 16.3 per cent from the previous year, to 21.0 million (18.0). The net sales increase was due to the strong backlog at the end of the year. European sales continued with strong growth as in the second half of last year.

The operating result for the period was EUR 1.5 million (1.0), which corresponds to 7.1 per cent of net sales (5.3). The profitability improvement is all attributable to the growth in net sales.

The result before taxes was EUR 0.8 million (0.8), and the net result was EUR 0.29 million (0.15). Net profit improved by 92.3 per cent. Earnings per share for the period under review were EUR 0.00 (0.00).

The Group’s financial income/expenses were EUR -0.7 million, which is a result of US dollar long-term strengthening. The tax expense for the period was EUR 0.5 million (0.6), of which EUR 0.3 million were withholding taxes related to double taxation (0.7).

The Group’s order backlog increased from the previous year and was EUR 55.8 million (42.2) at the end of the period.

Comptel Strategy

Life is digital moments. Digital demand will be driven by “Generation Cloud” customers and enterprises interacting with millions of digital applications. The Internet of Things with billions of connected devices will further accelerate digital demand, leading to exploding data volumes. Future mobile and fixed networks will provide hyper speeds and undergo a transformation from hardware to software. Network functions will be virtualised. Mounting complexity will require orchestration of business flows and virtualised resources.

Comptel’s mission is to perfect digital moments and translate them into business moments by connecting digital demand and supply.

The Comptel strategy focuses on providing solutions for digital and communications service providers in two major areas – Intelligent Data and Service Orchestration. The Intelligent Data business delivers solutions and services to customers for monetising data and turning Big Data into intelligent, automated actions. The Service Orchestration business area provides solutions and services for business flow orchestration and mastering the digital buying experience.

Comptel’s strategic target is to establish itself as a leading software vendor for connecting digital demand and supply.

Strategy execution is based on six strategic objectives: solutions with unique value, thought leadership, customer excellence, new markets, leverage by partners and inspired people.

Comptel´s marketing strategy strives for industry thought leadership on carefully selected themes and topics which are: the digital buying experience, monetising more with less time, orchestration of service and order flows from ground to cloud, and intelligent fast data. The essence of Comptel’s thought leadership is captured in the book, Operation Nexterday, that was launched at Mobile World Congress in March 2015.

We expect 2015 net sales to grow compared to the previous year, and we expect operating profit to be in the range of 8-12%, excluding one-time charges.


Comptel, Chess and Data Analytics in Italy

Posted: June 26th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Behind the Scenes | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments »

This is a special guest post from Comptel Sales Manager Cristina Monacelli.

On June 13, Comptel hosted an event in Rome at the Finnish ambassador’s residence to introduce our solutions to the Italian telecommunications market. We really wanted to engage with the country’s communications service providers (CSPs) and this gathering gave us that opportunity.

CEO Juhani Hintikka shared the strategy behind Comptel’s slogan, ‘Making Data Beautiful,’ and illustrated the power of automating decision-making to drive business opportunities and build stronger customer relationships.

Luca Desiata, our keynote speaker of the evening, delivered a thought-provoking and powerful presentation on “Chess and Corporate Strategy.” He used the metaphor of chess as a guideline for a course of corporate strategy, leadership, decision-making and problem-solving.

In the latter part of the evening, the guests experienced exquisite Finnish delicacies, including fennel-salmon with horseradish and Rhubarb pie, as found in some of the country’s best traditional restaurants. And, of course, everyone enjoyed the taste of the fine Italian wines.

The Chess Game Behind Corporate Strategy

Desiata’s keynote speech began by outlining the game of chess itself – a game with deep historical roots and enduring cross-cultural fascination, and how it was influenced by strategic thinking, elegance, analytical skills, intuition and talent.

Chess has been used throughout history for a number of parallels but, strangely enough, never before for corporate strategy. It has contributed to the progress of information technology and artificial intelligence, and has been used to test war strategies and psychological theories, but businesses have been largely left out of the equation.

Since Desiata is a corporate strategy expert with a passion for this game, he decided to change that. His speech highlighted the powerful ideas in his new his book, which is appropriately titled  Chess and Corporate Strategy, and what business leaders can learn from this age-old game, including:

1. Advanced Strategic Thinking

Decades ago, experiments were conducted with some of the greatest chess champions. A team of psychologists asked the players to verbally explain the process of strategy elaboration behind a move, and discovered categories of thinking that are surprisingly similar to the ways of business strategy.

Some of the most poignant parallels were around decision-making biases and pitfalls in the process of strategy elaboration. Just like chess masters, executives have to reconsider all of the options on the table again and again, and make sure their decisions aren’t being weighed by pre-existing beliefs.

2. Negotiations

A game of chess is all about careful negotiations. Players trade pieces and spaces and hope they’re getting the better part of the deal.

Negotiations tournaments can mimic this process by dividing people into pairs to negotiate on a business case. These negotiations are repeated by changing pairs until, after a certain number of runs, the winner of the “tournament” emerges. The tournament dynamics highlight the transactional, prize-forming process, which in the last rounds tend to converge towards an equilibrium value determined by different elements such as technique, motivation and preparation.

3. Approach to Risk and Uncertainty Management

Risk-return matrices – like losing a Queen to take out a well-positioned Rook on the chessboard – are constantly applied to the financial and industrial portfolios. Desiata explained that the risk attitude of a chess player for choosing a variation is similar to the risk attitude of an investor. This establishes a quantitative parallel between chess and finance.

Chess and Corporate Strategy” by Luca Desiata has been offered at MIP – Politechnique of Milan Business School and at Bocconi University’s Executive MBA. Customized executive courses have been given for managers of major Italian companies.


Comptel’s Strategy Update – Turning Big Data into an Opportunity

Posted: March 21st, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: News | Tags: , , | 2 Comments »

Comptel held Annual General Meeting on Wednesday 20th March. Our Board of Directors and management updated the company’s strategy and objectives for the next three years. The updated strategy for 2013-2015 focuses on accelerating the execution of the Event-Analysis-Action strategic framework we launched in 2011. Comptel is aiming at over ten percent growth in net sales annually and EBIT margin between 8 to 15 percent during the strategy period. This includes scaling up the sales with partners. Both of these focus areas facilitate Comptel’s growth strategy.

The market demands the communications service providers (CSPs) to better monetize the growing data traffic, known as Big Data, beyond the communications network data. This data can include for example usage data, social network data, location and customer relationship management data. Comptel helps the Communications Service Providers (CSPs) turn the Big Data into an opportunity. Today, Comptel already processes 21 terabytes (1012 ) data per day.

Comptel’s differentiation strategy challenges the traditional operating and business support system (OSS/BSS) approach by bringing predictive, real-time analytics as an innovative element to help CSPs integrate technical, sales and marketing organisations and automate the CSP’s customer interaction. We commissioned a research earlier this year that revealed that nine out of ten customers desire personalised interaction with their mobile operators. The yearn for communication at every touch point—from the first interaction when joining the service to when they are experiencing issues with the service to when their needs are changing.

Key investments in the product and solution offering will focus on strengthening the Event-Analysis-Action approach. Big Data opportunity strengthens Comptel’s position in event data collection – applying analytics turns this data into automated actions that are carried out by Comptel’s service order orchestration.

By the end of 2015, Comptel aims to become a recognised thought leader and leading solutions provider in customer interaction automation space.


Q3 2012: An Update on Comptel’s Business and Strategy

Posted: October 23rd, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: News | Tags: , , , , , , | Comments Off on Q3 2012: An Update on Comptel’s Business and Strategy

Last week, we announced Comptel’s financials for the third quarter of 2012, which proved that our earlier focus on cost containment is quickly showing results. This quarter was ripe with strong sales, bringing the company back to profitability, and I am very pleased to show revenue growth in all of Comptel’s areas of business.

We won two significant projects from South America – one is outside of our traditional domain, from a Brasilian utility company that purchased Comptel Fulfillment, and the other is with Telefonica Argentina that continued to consolidate its mediation systems with Comptel. Reinforcing our position as a powerful analytics vendor, we also closed a Comptel Social Links deal with a prominent operator group in the Middle East. In addition, there was a considerably large sized managed service deal, and a few larger upgrades of Comptel Mediation and Comptel Fulfillment contracts from existing customers.

As anticipated, the operating result for the third quarter was positive. We met the cost-savings targets set in June, and the cost level for this quarter was significantly lower compared to the first half of the year. Now, it is time to move forward following the regrettable personnel-related efficiency measure we completed during the quarter and continue the execution of our strategy. We’re confident that we’re moving in the right direction and are further improving the integration of our analytics capabilities and striving to deliver on our corporate values.

One of our goals is to become the leader in customer interaction automation for telecommunications, and we’re also looking to expand this outside of our traditional domain. This will ultimately have an impact on our sales and marketing strategy, which will both be aligned with the approach, as the role of our partners will become even more important. In order to implement the new sales and marketing approach, we decided to build a strong team of sales executives, headed by the newly established role of Chief Market Operations Officer (CMO), who will take the lead in this transformation. At the same time, we also simplified our Executive Board to ensure the organisation is as efficient as possible and can successfully execute the strategy.

Overall, the third quarter of 2012 has been quite busy. Maybe the best way to sum up this quarter is to simply reiterate how I concluded the last quarter: I’m honoured to convey, on behalf of Comptel, that we are looking forward to continuing to deliver on our promises to the market in the fourth quarter of 2012.


Q2 2012: An Update on Comptel’s Business and Strategy

Posted: July 18th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: News | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Today, we announced Comptel’s financials for the second quarter of 2012 and for the first half of the year as a whole. This is a personal milestone for me, as it marks my second year fully immersed as CEO — and as you’ll see from our mid-year highlights, I’m confident in the direction the company is moving.

This past quarter, our order backlog rose to a record high, as we won a significant EUR 5.4 million project to consolidate the mediation systems of a leading operator in Western Europe.

The upfront investments in the customer interface have yielded results in our largest regions, Europe and Asia, and we won seven new customers globally. Although our net sales have not yet met expected levels, they stayed on par with last year’s numbers, EUR 20.3 million (EUR 20.0 million). And we are optimistic our investments will grow our 2012 net sales approximately 10 per cent from the previous year. Integration of the advanced analytics expertise acquired in February 2012 has proceeded exceptionally well, resulting in winning our first deal for Comptel Social Links software.

We continued to bring new products to the market as key strategic initiatives. The major launch of Next Generation Comptel Fulfillment 8 software this quarter was received remarkably favourably by the OSS/BSS industry.  We also unveiled our Contextual Intelligence for Telco (CIQ4T) concept this quarter, providing communications service providers a framework for bringing customer experience to the next level. This innovative approach truly differentiates Comptel in the market.

Our business mix of licence and services sales was impaired by the personnel, project delivery and marketing costs, causing lower operative results than expected. To remedy this, we initiated first productivity action by streamlining R&D in Norway and further cost saving initiatives will bring us approximately EUR 10 million on annual level. During the second half of 2012, we will realise EUR 3-4 million savings. These initiatives will secure our competitiveness, sustain the execution of our strategy, and deliver an estimated 0 – 5 per cent operating profit of net sales, excluding one-off items.

Beyond the figures, we also concentrated the first half of the year on executing our new strategy. We opened new offices in Istanbul and Cairo  and announced several major customer wins around the world. These included, Telefónica Central America’s mediation consolidation that enabled the efficient management of more than half a billion daily transactions, Thai mobile operator Real Move’s deployment of Comptel’s Fulfilment solution to gain customers from the 3G market,  Kcell Kazakhstan’s replacement of its provisioning and activation system with Comptel’s Fulfilment suite to support its 3G rollout, and Kuwaiti’s  Watanya Telecom improvement of its customers’ first use experience with Comptel’s Dynamic SIM solution.

We also launched a new portfolio approach with our Customer Engagement solutions and Comptel Services Portfolio, in addition to a refreshed Comptel brand identity at Mobile World Congress Barcelona in February. We shared a white paper regarding Contextual Intelligence for Telcoms at Management World Dublin and organised our annual Comptel User Group in Copenhagen with more than 100 participants from leading service providers and industry analysts. On top of this, our customer engagement solutions were honoured in Pipeline’s Innovation Awards and the 2012 IBM Beacon Awards as the best communications industry solutions — reinforcing our capability to bring innovative products and solutions to the market.

Overall, the first half of 2012 has been largely focused on executing our strategy, investing in bringing new products to market, winning new customers and developing our Services Business. As we move into this next quarter, we’ll continue onwards building on our stated strategy and remain confident the productivity programme will secure our competitiveness. And I’m honoured to convey, on behalf of Comptel, that we are looking forward to continuing to deliver on our promises to the market in the second half of 2012.


Q4 2011: An Update on Comptel’s Business and Strategy

Posted: February 10th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: News | Tags: , , | 1 Comment »

Today, we announced Comptel’s financials for the fourth quarter of 2011 and for the year as a whole.

The past year was my first at Comptel, and it was one in which I led the company through necessary transformation. We renewed the organisation and executive board, established new teams and offices, launched new values and formulated a new strategy. We also hired a significant amount of new people to get closer to our customers and prospects. In addition, we increased our investments in R&D to bring new products to the market.

Obviously, this having been a period of transition, our net sales have remained flat (€76.8 million), and our profit has been affected by the investments for growth that we have made (operating profit excluding one-off items was €2.8 million).

However, I am pleased to see that the work we have all put into improving Comptel is beginning to bear fruit. For example, both employee and customer surveys are showing increased satisfaction. We have also managed to win 15 new customers this year, five of which are located in new countries for us and 10 of which came in Q4. Our order backlog has improved significantly, with 23 orders with a value over 500,000 euros booked during the year. This, I believe, creates good conditions for growth in 2012.


Q3 2011: An Update on Comptel’s Business and Strategy

Posted: October 21st, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: News | Tags: , , , , , | Comments Off on Q3 2011: An Update on Comptel’s Business and Strategy

It’s been a really busy and eventful third quarter for Comptel, and today we announced our results.

Over the past quarter, we announced the agreement reached with Cisco to purchase the AXIOSS assets. This obviously had a significant financial impact on the quarter. It also provided Comptel with the incentive and the means to accelerate the development of our Next Generation Fulfillment (NGF) platform (more details about this soon).

During the three-month period, we closed three major deals with a value of over €0.5 million. We also continued investing in our sales channels and service organisation, and hiring new employees, as part of our strategy to get closer to our customers.

So in terms of the results, Comptel’s business developed favourably in the Middle East and the Americas. Net sales also grew in Europe West; however, in Europe East, the deliveries remained few. Overall, Comptel’s net sales were €16.6 million, up from last year’s Q3 (€15.3 million), but still below our expectations. Our operating result, excluding one-off items, was €-0.8 million as result of the investments we have been making. Once the impact of the AXIOSS sale is taken into consideration, the operating result is €8 million.

Comptel has been working hard on many fronts, including our strategy, which we will be unveiling this quarter. So stay tuned!


Q1 2011: An Update on Comptel’s Business and Strategy

Posted: April 15th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: News | Tags: , , , , | Comments Off on Q1 2011: An Update on Comptel’s Business and Strategy

Today we announced our Q1 2011 results. I have to admit they were disappointing on the financial side. Most notably, our net sales in Europe and the Middle East did not live up to expectations.

On the positive side, the APAC region continued to perform well. I was especially pleased about Australia’s NBN Co becoming a customer. NBN Co is doing very leading-edge things, bringing high-speed broadband to virtually every premise in the country. It’s a very high profile initiative, and I know many other countries are looking carefully at similar developments, so we are really excited about being part of this ground-breaking initiative.

From an organisational point of view, Q1 was a period of change. We continued to implement our initiative to get closer to customers and partners, chiefly by putting resources next to them. We also announced the split of our European operations into Europe West and Europe East, to take into account the very different features of the markets in terms of maturity, saturation and growth. We also got positive customer feedback about the new setup for the Inventory business.

This will be in many ways a year of building a new foundation for growth.


Q2 2010: An Overview of Comptel’s Business and Strategy

Posted: July 22nd, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: News | Tags: , , , , , | Comments Off on Q2 2010: An Overview of Comptel’s Business and Strategy

As a public company (NASDAQ OMX Helsinki: CTL1V), Comptel has a duty to publish its quarterly results, and today, we announced our results for the second quarter of 2010.

Being a publicly quoted company means Comptel needs to have a strong financial discipline, which sometimes requires us to make tough decisions, but ultimately ensures that Comptel is able to invest in its people, products and solutions for the benefit of our customers. It is telling that Comptel has been in business nearly 25 years (since 1986). How many companies in the OSS/BSS market can claim this? How many companies have come and gone in that time? This is important because Communications Service Providers (CSPs) make investments for the long term, and need to know that they have a reliable “partner for the future”.

In that context, I am pleased to say the second quarter was a good one for Comptel. Our net sales grew significantly, and we almost reached our operating profit target of 20 percent. The growth of net sales was due in part to the recovery in Europe and the Americas, which was very pleasing as Comptel (in common with other OSS/BSS companies) had been hit in the past year by the downturn in the market in those regions. Significant license upgrades in Asia also contributed to the growth—a good illustration of the partnership we aim to develop with our customers.

Our order book is also looking healthy. During the second quarter, we sold nine new core licenses, including one Comptel Policy Control and one Comptel Dynamic SIM Management, both of which are generating a lot of interest in the market at the moment. We also sold two licenses of Comptel Fulfillment , which is also very pleasing, as it shows there is still plenty of life in the fulfilment market!

Another satisfying point for me is the continued growth of our partner sales. It has been part of Comptel’s strategy to become much more partner-friendly than we have been in the past, and clearly our efforts are bearing fruit.

All in all, I think these result are good news for all of the stake-holders in the company, including of course our investors and our customers.