Mr. Pindar: The business listed on the stock exchange back in 1989, and since that time we've developed a broadly-based professional support services group providing a range of white-collar activities. Our services span the outsourcing of IT, administrative functions including running finance departments for people, HR operations, where we will run payroll, personnel, recruitment, out placement; we also operate call centres for organisations -so quite a broad span of white-collar services. In terms of the markets that we serve, we're focused on four key markets: one is local government, two is central government, three is the education sector, and four is the private sector. I should also add that all of that is focused upon the UK. We are slightly unusual for a FTSE 100 company in that we have virtually no overseas business and our current strategy is that we're going to continue to be focused on the UK as well.
TWST: Can you give some descriptive statistics for the industry you're
involved in, its current size and growth potential?
Mr. Pindar: It's still quite a young industry and therefore producing
good quality market statistics is difficult. If one were to measure the
market, say, a year ago, even in the space of the last 12 months there
have been new opportunities and new contracts which have been created
from scratch, which therefore make measuring the market difficult. For
example, in the last 12 months we won a contract worth an estimated
GBP400 million to set up a government agency called the Criminal Records
Bureau. If you look back 12 months ago, that was not really something
which was on the radar screen. So one of the exciting things about the
market is that it's evolving the whole time. If one was to try to look
across the four markets that I spoke about, we estimate that over the
next three to four years those markets could be worth somewhere in the
region of GBP20 billion a year. And if you compare that against the
turnover that the brokers are expecting us to produce for 2000, which is
around 450 million, you'll see that there is a substantial amount of
business still available for us to go for.
Tickers included in this excerpt: CPI.L
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