Expected Developments by Segment.
We expect net sales in both the Banking and Retail segments to be slightly down on the level of the previous year. Given that our portfolio of solutions is specifically geared towards enhancing the competitiveness of our customers, especially in tight market situations, we intend to expand our global sales activities over the course of fiscal 2009/2010 with a view to exploiting fully the opportunities that present themselves.
By Business Stream.
Although we anticipate a downturn in the Hardware business in fiscal 2009/2010, we believe that the Software/Services (Glossary) business will continue to grow, albeit not sufficiently to make up for the renewed decline in hardware sales.
In the Hardware business, with prospects for the economy remaining uncertain, our view is that banks and retailers will extend the intervals between upgrades to their older, previously installed systems. All in all, our strategy is to focus on strengthening our business with regard to innovative high-end hardware. Within the Banking segment, this includes intelligent deposit (Glossary) and cash recycling systems (Glossary) , while the main high-end applications in the Retail segment are automated checkout, retail cash management (Glossary) and reverse vending. We can still take advantage of promising opportunities in these fields by helping our customers to achieve significant benefits in their business processes. The pressure on our customers to change usually demands some form of holistic solution that may involve combining different elements from our portfolio to meet their specific requirements.
We aim to boost sales in the Software/Services business by further developing our application suites for retail banks and retailers. Beyond this, we intend to significantly expand our activities in the area of Professional Services (Glossary) . We also started the new fiscal year with enhanced capability in the field of IT Services, and we have begun to bundle our service resources as part of the ProFuture project. The aim is to deploy these resources multinationally in the form of Shared Services, e.g., call centers for technical support and spare parts storage. With regard to Managed Services (Glossary) , we anticipate a substantial increase in the number of remote managed systems in the new fiscal year. We hope to exploit our Outsourcing (Glossary) know-how to appeal to other European countries and attract new customers for our self-service channel management and transaction settlement software.
