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CEO of BTS Group highlights advantages of business simulations in corporate training market Full article published: 02/05/2003     HENRIK EKELUND is the President and Chief Executive Officer of BTS Group AB


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TWST: Could you begin with a brief historical sketch and overview of the BTS Group (OTC:BGPBF.PK) ?

Mr. Ekelund: BTS operates within the corporate training market and we serve mostly large companies, the Fortune 500s in North America, Northern Europe, Australia and South Africa, we train and develop the business acumen of their executives, managers and employees. BTS is a world leader in providing customized business simulations for these market segments.

TWST: Can you talk in more detail about these business simulations?

Mr. Ekelund: Very briefly, it’s a type of learning-by-doing, it’s the same type of thing when you train a pilot to fly a plane; you don’t teach him by giving him a lecture on how to fly, but you put him in a simulator. We can actually test, fly, crash and learn from that. Learning by doing is a far more effective way of training decision making, than any listening or reading. So we customize business simulations to our different clients. In these simulations executives, managers and employees can make decisions and they see what the potential impact is on profit, growth, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction, for example. It is a very effective way of training business acumen and it is increasing in popularity for training in corporate settings. We deliver these simulations in workshops for our customers and we provide the consultants facilitating the workshops. We also provide them online. The company was founded in the mid 80's in 1986. At that time I was working as a consultant with a strategy-consulting group in Stockholm and we studied the execution of the recommendations we gave to our clients, and we found that only a minority of the actual recommendations we gave were implemented. The companies were weak in execution, although often with good strategies, and the execution failed because they didn’t have all the executives, managers and key people aligned to the changes. We founded this company on the principles that education is a great way to improve their business and drive profitability and growth. We looked at the different education methods and found that simulations were very effective. We started the company with a few employees and US5,000 in cash. We built the company, grew it through its own cash flow, we took in customers and built our own technology. It was a slow process for five or six years and in the early 90s we had everything set up and we started to expand into the UK and into the US. We have today trained about 300,000 people in 53 different countries. Last year we became listed on the Stockholm Exchange. Today the US is about half of our business and the rest of the world is the other half.

TWST: Can you detail your revenue streams?

Mr. Ekelund: There are basically three sources of revenue; customization revenue, seminar revenue and license revenue. Customization is when we customize the simulation; we charge a fee to a client for doing their customization. If we then deliver seminars, we charge a price per seminar, typically two to three day seminars, and more and more customers want to do the training themselves and then we train their trainers and we charge them a license fee per user.

TWST: What can you highlight on the company’s agenda for the next 12 to 24 months?

Mr. Ekelund: There is a large untapped potential for using business simulations. There is so much training going on where the simulations are not used, so our goal is to continue to grow within our core business and exploit this untapped, potential winning new customers, developing new applications, where simulations are used and also entering into new geographic markets. We do this through organic growth and also through selected acquisitions.


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This interview is a small excerpt from a comprehensive interview published in The Wall Street Transcript on 02/05/03. For more information call (212) 952 7400. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.

Copyright 2003, Wall Street Transcript Corp.

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