Privasia confident of consistent growth

PETALING JAYA: Privasia Technology Bhd is confident of recording consistent growth this year as in previous years on the back of its solid order book.

Group chief executive officer Puvanesan Subenthiran said the group's total order book currently stood at RM120 million, mostly in the utilities segment with fixed monthly billing and would last until 2020.

"These are the work that we have already invested and now providing services to customers," he told reporters after the group's AGM in Petaling Jaya on Friday.

Currently, most of the group's businesses were new and there were still space to grow as long as the company focussed on them, he said.

For this year, the group's core businesses, namely outsourcing and consulting, would remain its main contributors with growth expected to come from satellite hub business and information and communication technology (ICT) segments, he said.

For financial year ended Dec 31, 2015, the group's pre-tax profit fell to RM3.31 million from RM9.36 million a year earlier. 
Its revenue, however, rose to RM81.35 million from RM73.89 million previously.

Its chairman Datuk Ali Abdul Kadir said that 2015 was a good year in some ways with revenue recording growth despite being a challenging year.

However, he said, the group's heavy investment, especially in the new satellite hub plus losses in foreign exchange of about RM1.1 million had dragged the profit down.

"This year the industry is expected to remain challenging with International Data Corp anticipating Malaysia's overall ICT spending to fall to 4.7% compared to double-digit rise in 2015," he said.

Ali said despite the bleak outlook, Privasia would continue to focus on growing with various strategies in place.

Puvanesan said with the investment in satellite hub facilities last year, the group planned to expand its offer of satellite facilities to potential customers in the oil and gas, maritime, hospitality and tourism as well as security sectors.

"We believe that with our expanded range of services, we could capture opportunities within these sectors that would require offshore or offsite telecommunications," he said.

This year, he said, Privasia was also eyeing to increase the number of clients and penetrate the Asean market with its enhanced e-procurement platform, "Procurehere" - a centralised and automated system that manages tenders and communications between organisations and potential vendors.

"Hence, this year Privasia is allocating RM800,000 in capital expenditure for cloud hosting and quicker reponse to further enhance the solution," he said. - Bernama