The company reported organic growth of 3.2%, higher than the sector average, and a 3.5% net profit. The increase was mainly due to services activities: development and third-party application maintenance, testing and acceptance, facilities management and private cloud.
Hardis Group has announced its results for 2012. Turnover stood at €54.7 million, up 3.2% on 2011 (€53m). Above-sector-average organic growth with net profit of 3.5%. In 2013, Hardis expects to generate turnover of €57 million, particularly through continuing to develop its activities abroad.
2012: growth supported by services and international business
Of the €54.7 million in turnover, 70% originated from services activities and 30% from software publishing. "Given the economic context, particularly at the end of 2012, we are very pleased to have completed our 29th consecutive year of profitable growth, while increasing our workforce from 620 to 630," said Christian Balmain, Hardis Group President.
In line with forecasts, 2012 growth was driven by development and third-party application maintenance (TPAM), application testing and acceptance and outsourced management of IT infrastructure (facilities management and cloud) activities in France and Switzerland.
"The Consulting and project owner support business unit experienced 40% growth in 2012 thanks to consulting and services digitization offerings and software testing activities, two buoyant markets," explained Yvan Coutaz, Executive Vice President of the group.
The increase in turnover can also be explained by the development of the logistics chain management software publishing activity outside France (particularly in Poland, South Africa and Brazil) and in the e-commerce sector.
2013: focus on digitization of services and omni-channel strategy
In 2013, Hardis Group set itself the target of achieving a turnover of €57 million, which is 4.2% growth and higher than Syntec forecasts.
For service activities, the company leverages its teams' ability to provide customers with end-to-end support when digitizing their services, from definition to IT design. With this aim in mind, it will continue to verticalize its offerings dedicated to insurance, transport, distribution and industry sectors in order to better meet the needs and challenges of each business sector.
"For example, we plan to capitalize on our know-how in the fields of transformation, TPAM and facilities management of applications running in IBM i (AS/400) environments in order to satisfy the strong demand for mobility, e-commerce and omni-channel solutions," explained Nicolas Odet, Executive Vice President of the group.
At the same time, Hardis Group is also seeking to strengthen its position in the cloud with the marketing of a brand new PaaS in private cloud offering for development and testing environments, and by developing its end-to-end IS management activities for SMEs.
There are many opportunities for growth in software publishing: management of all logistics flows (BtoB and e-commerce) with the same tool for retail and textile customers, acceleration of sales for e-commerce pure plays and development of international projects thanks to integrator partners who have now upskilled.
"Reflex WMS is already available in French, English, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Polish and will be provided in Portuguese, Russian and Chinese by the end of 2013," explained Jean-Yves Costa, Logistics Solutions Director.