Florin Cașotă
2019 will go down in Bittnet’s history as the best year so far in terms of the consolidation of the position on the Romanian market, which will be visible through a significant increase in the revenues at the Group level compared to 2018.
Throughout 2019, Bittnet maintained 90% of its customer base and managed higher investment budgets while expanding client portfolio to new sectors and businesses. Each of the companies from the Group has grew its portfolio of services in 2019, thus strengthening Bittnet’s overall financial performance.
On the educational side, Bittnet Training finalized the beta version of UXI, the learning management system for the Group’s strategic clients while Equatorial launched three educational games – Oligopoloy, the business simulation developed together with Raiffeisen Bank, WhiteHat, and Bona Fides Agency game built together with Microsoft. In terms of IT integration, Dendrio has focused in 2019 on cloud services, increasing by 44% the number of cloud projects managed and by 200% the number of new contracts signed in that area.
Additionally, Dendrio has successfully delivered the first projects in the area of Robotic Process Automation, a strategic direction where the company wants to build its recognition on the local market in the near future. On top of that, the Group continued its national expansion as well as signed the first strategic partnership, with ROCA investment platform that integrates collaboration in the area of digitalization, education as well as capital markets.
Bittnet plans for 2020
Starting from 2020, Bittnet Group proposes to its shareholders the same accelerated growth strategy, which includes for the next 3-5 years expansion to foreign markets in the region of Central and Eastern Europe. The internationalization of the group's activity will coincide with Bittnet Group’s transfer from AeRO to the Main Market of the Bucharest Stock Exchange.
„Starting next year, we plan to implement a new development strategy which envisages M&A activities on the Central and Eastern European markets. The process of identifying partnership and acquisition targets will take some time but we have the ambition to become, in the next couple of years, one of the top 5 companies on the Romanian IT market, with an established presence in the region.
We are confident that the transfer to the Main Market of the Bucharest Stock Exchange will help us in this endeavor by providing Bittnet Group visibility, recognition, as well as access to larger pools of capital” said Mihai Logofatu, CEO at Bittnet Group.
The company plans to present to a more detailed outline of the 2020-2022 development strategy during the 2020 Bittnet Investors’ Day, an annual event organized for company’s key stakeholders, which takes place in April of each year.
Bittnet’s transfer to the Main Market, which was initially envisaged to take place by the end of 2019, is expected to take place in the first months of 2020. The postponing of the process has been directly related to the obligation of the company to re-publish the consolidated financial results according to the IFRS reporting requiremenrs for the past 3 years, a process that lasted longer than initially expected by the management and the advisors.
“We are looking forward to floating Bittnet shares on the Main Market of the Bucharest Stock Exchange in an as short time possible since we expect that the transfer will help Bittnet undergo accelerated evolution, similar to that we have seen between 2015 and 2019, but at a larger scale. Bittnet shares and bonds continue to benefit from increased trading activity, with BNET shares being the 24th most traded stock on the Bucharest Stock Exchange, both Main Market and AeRO, since the beginning of this year. We believe that this pattern will continue in the period preceding and following the transfer to the Main Market” said Cristian Logofatu, CFO at Bittnet Group.
Between 2015, the year that Bittnet shares first floated on AeRO and today, Bittnet shares have registered an estimated 65% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) for revenues, an estimated 65% CAGR of market capitalization and approximate 70% CAGR of shareholder equity.
According to the estimates, the Romanian IT market is expected to reach between 10-15% of the GDP in the course of the next 5 years together with an increase of IT professionals, from 130,000 that we see today, to approximately 300,000 by 2025.
