Moneycontrol » News » Business » Earnings

To realign client portfolio by year-end: Cambridge Sol

Published on Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 11:30 | Source : CNBC-TV18

Updated at Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 15:10

1264 Investors following Cambridge Sol. Share this News with them.

Share on Tumblr

Nimesh Soni, Head of Exchanging India, Cambridge Solutions

Excerpts from Bazaar on CNBC-TV18 Watch the full show »

RELATED NEWS

Cambridge Solutions plunges 4.7%

ALSO READ

Cambridge Sol

BSE | NSE 31/05/12

Are Mutual Funds betting on Cambridge Sol?

Cambridge Solutions has announced its Q3CY09 consolidated results. It has reported net loss of Rs 24.7 crore as against Rs 275.3 crore, on quarter-on-quarter basis, (QoQ). Net sales went down at Rs 285 crore versus Rs 302.81 crore while operating profit was up at Rs 20.7 crore versus Rs 9.89 crore.

Nimesh Soni, Head of Exchanging India, Cambridge Solutions , says the company has undertaken various steps to improve operating performance.

"Slowdown in the banking, financial services, and insurance space impacted the BPO business in the last two quarters. However, we now have a robust BFSI pipeline in Europe and US."

The company, he added, hopes to realign our client portfolio by year-end.

Here is a verbatim transcript of the exclusive interview with Nimesh Soni on CNBC-TV18. Also see the accompanying video.

Q: Your losses have been paired down quite significantly to Rs 24 crore. Could you take us through what led to the pairing of losses and what items specifically have led to that Rs 275 crore loss in the comparable quarter?

A: I am sorry I can't go through the details. A series of measures were taken over the last few quarters - nothing large anywhere. A lot of small improvements that we did across our operations helped to make our operations more efficient. We will continue to do that in the coming quarters and strengthen our operating margins.

Q: Your Q2 business process outsourcing (BPO) revenues or Q3 BPO revenues quarter-on-quarter are actually down, can you take us through why that has happened and do you expect more pressure on the BPO business in the subsequent quarters as well?

A: Not really. We did a lot of work in the banking, insurance, and property markets. Over the last few quarters, there has been a significant reduction in securities and transaction volumes in the Europe and US. So, this has an impact on our revenues, because many times we do work based on transaction and volumes of the business. As equity markets start to stack up, the volume will come back, so you should see that kind of change.

Q: What about topline growth? It has been quite flattish in terms of revenue growth. What is it that you hope to do in the next two quarters?

A: We have a solid pipeline. Once we are out of this nervous period, the decisions will start getting laid. There were some delays in decision making. Going forward, we will see some momentum building back again.

Q: Specifically on the banking and financial side, what is the pipeline looking like?

A: I can't give you any specific names because we have a very robust pipeline in Europe and US. We are in a very advance stage in many of them. We have some very large client base in Europe. We are hoping that as the securities markets comes back up, there would be interest and we will start getting some positive signals and get some go ahead on some of our pipeline.

Q: By when do you think you will be able to report quarter-on-quarter growth in your revenues looking at how the IT and the BPO segments are doing? By which quarter do you think you will be able to see Q1 growth?

A: I do not want to commit. There is every attempt being made. There is also some realignment because of the merger between Xchanging and Cambridge. There is some realignment on what we want to sell, where we want to sell, how do we want to sell. For example, our IT business was very traditional. We did small deals to large deals and the focus now is to realign the IT towards large deals. This is very closely linked to our overall BPO solutions with large customer base. During that process, we are going to have some amount of short-term saving as we align our sales and technology platforms. It is very hard to exactly specify when we will see that. But we are hoping that by end of this year our realignment works and next year is our streamlining year. We all hope it will be soon but it will take its time because it's just too very large businesses that are being merged here.