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TWST: Can we begin with a brief introduction to HITT (Amsterdam:HITT.AS) including one or two words on your core markets and products?

Mr. van der Scheer: The current focus of the company is in three product markets: air traffic control, vessel traffic and information services, and navigation support and hydrography. The first two, we define as the “traffic segment”, are typically project businesses. We sell systems that enhance the safety of a port or an airport to civil aviation authorities or port authorities. The third one is software packages and that’s for our specialized markets mainly in the nautical space where we provide software for taking a hydrographic picture of the sea bottom or river bottom and thereby help navigate ships with very precise characteristics. That, for instance, would be applicable for large oil tankers. We also have additional activities on top of that to basically support the installed base of our projects. These are essentially technical services with which we provide long-term maintenance and advice to our customers. As a company, we started 26 years ago now, in 1976, as a division of an industrial conglomerate that was focused on the defense industry. At that time, the company was part of the Philips Electronics Group and they sold the military aspect of the company to Thompson in 1990. Thompson’s strategy was to develop into a global player with local producing entities. In the periods 1990-1994 the defense industry had some difficult years and Thompson reviewed it’s portfolio of activities and decided to withdraw from the Dutch civil division, which shaped an opportunity for a management buy-out to form a separate company. The company grew in the period from 1994 from a turnover of €1.7 million in terms of markets turnover to a current close to €40 million turnover. So there has been quite a rapid growth. This growth brought management to the decision in 1998 to find new sources of financing the growth and a decision was made to go to the stock exchange, which at that time of course was quite usual for fairly small companies. It has been a fairly successful launch on the stock exchange. At that time there was also a Dutch stock exchange, Amsterdam AEX, which today is part of the Euronext. The company went I think on a level of 44 times the profits to the stock exchange and was oversubscribed for well over 66 times, which I think is still a record on the Dutch stock market.

TWST: Who are you competing against?

Mr. van der Scheer: It is a fairly new technology in its current shape and the market is growing. It is a competitive market. In Air traffic control, specifically ground movement, we have one big competitor, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman. Together, we share about 60% of the world markets. And then we have a longer role of players that also provide these systems. We see them as being players (not) at the leading end of a niche market. Here you are talking about Raytheon, Alenia-Marconi and Thales -- Thales perhaps being the first of these three. But that is it, although you also have to consider that the market is fairly small. Our competitors mainly focus on adjacent big markets. I talked about area control and approach systems, which are very large systems in terms of project size, and we in our niche market of ground movement are talking about 2½ million to 5 million dollar projects, whereas area control we are talking about 100 million to 200 million dollar projects. So it’s entirely a different game and that also makes the large companies not entirely to be organized for these smaller projects. And then we have the advantage of flexibility. On the vessel traffic side we again see competition from larger companies like Lockheed Martin to some extent , although they are a kind of team partner of ours as well, a subsidiary of Northrop and perhaps EADS. STN Atlas of Germany is probably our closest competitor. And then you have a range of players like the subsidiary of BEA and a few others.