Product Business.
In fiscal 2004/2005, our production facilities in Singapore and Shanghai were expanded to include production of existing product lines. The move was aimed to further expand our global production capabilities.

The Company's global development and production facilities are organized on a decentralized basis but all units operate in close collaboration. Central quality and product management ensures compliance with our high levels of quality.

Product revenues rose 9 % to € 1,032 million (previous year: € 950 million). The product business accounted for 59 % of total net sales (previous year: 60 %).

Solutions & Services.
Revenues from solutions and services grew strongly, up 14 % to € 712 million (previous year: € 626 million). Solutions and services now account for 41 % of total net sales revenue (previous year: 40 %). In the long term, we are looking to grow the solutions and services share of our business to approximately half of our net sales revenue.

We were able to successfully grow our solutions business internationally in the fiscal year. Our global network of local competence centers was extended to ensure that we can implement, update and integrate solutions worldwide within our customers’ IT environments. Close collaboration on the ground also ensures that we are involved more closely in the ongoing development of our customers’ business processes and are able to offer them new solutions. In both the banking and retail segments, openness and stronger internationalization of software solutions are top priorities.

We won key orders with our open multichannel software architecture, ProClassic/Enterprise, which offers banks flexibility and investment security. We were able to further consolidate our already strong position in middleware for retail banks. Demand was also strong for installation of software to operate multivendor ATM networks. We received several orders from large international banks for this software.

An important step toward becoming a complete solutions provider was made with our in-store solutions for retailers. These solutions are not limited merely to applications for operating checkout systems; they also support a wide variety of different types of checkout systems as well as other in-store processes and new automation solutions using one software. Deployed internationally, the solutions offer a uniform operating platform for store operations.

Our services business continued its strong growth track of recent years, complementing our products and solutions with a comprehensive portfolio of services built around all the IT systems used by our customers. These services range from traditional maintenance and management of multivendor IT infrastructures to complete operation of entire business processes.

In the future, standardized, cost-optimized service offerings will be available through our newly introduced uniform “eServices Platform”. This platform is designed to simplify procedures and interfaces to customers and partners. It meets the requirements of large multinational corporations for uniform IT infrastructures and transparent processes. The “eServices Platform” enables services to be handled efficiently and customer service to be managed and controlled using agreed indicators (key performance indicators).

Our range of Customer Care Center solutions was ex-panded significantly in the fiscal year. The portfolio now includes online monitoring for remote diagnosis, Customer Excellence Center services, escalation management and end-user helpdesk services for retail and banking customers. The use of the “eServices Platform” for all services performed by the Customer Care Center allows swift access to relevant customer-related system data, simplifies internal processes, and therefore makes customer care activities much more efficient. The platform also benefits our own performance capability within outsourcing projects.

We will continue efforts to grow our outsourcing projects business. Several large-scale outsourcing projects were won in the fiscal year. To achieve this, we strengthened our in-house interdisciplinary capabilities in the areas of project administration and operational estimation and planning, for example risk management across all stages of an outsourcing project. In order to run these projects successfully, we have built up international infrastructures such as specialist data centers, helpdesks and technician organizations, and have installed a network of partners to manage services not provided by us in-house. One of these services, for example, is the supply of cash stocks to ATMs.