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TWST: Let’s start with an update on how you see Getronics (Amsterdam: GVKN.AS) positioned today?

Mr. Rückert: In terms of our market, the IT services market, we see this as currently either flat or slightly growing. We would expect a certain pick up, but not before 2004, maybe even the second half. However, with that said, we believe that some of the segments we are in have slightly more favorable tendencies. One of our major businesses managed services and outsourcing, as long as it leads to significant cost savings, is an attractive subject for everybody. It’s basically a question of coming up with an attractive proposal and being capable of dealing with both technical and business issues that will lead to interest or less interest on the side of the customer. So I see that as a growing area and performing better than the rest of the services market. However, the business solution market is average because it’s an investment market; whether it’s ERP or other fundamental software investments, it’s basically following the market trend I just mentioned.

TWST: Both you and your colleague Klaas Wagenaar came to Getronics just this past April. Tell us what your saw then, what plans you’ve laid down, and how much you’ve accomplished so far?

Mr. Rückert: I think the first point is that when we started, we basically found a company with an extremely interesting and solid customer base, basically larger corporations, half of which we serve on an international basis and half on a more national basis, and at least 70% or 80% of the services we provide in the home country or the given country. The astonishing thing for me was that they are all very satisfied customers. In these situations I am used to complaints letters. So I was very positively surprised by both the intimacy and I would almost say solidarity which we have seen with our customers. No doubt some of them might have called in a few competitors to find out about alternatives, but for the time being, whether it is renewals of major contracts or major bids in general, we have not lost any major customers. That is of course very encouraging to build on because our financial situation could have led to significant erosion as well as some operational problems. I look at Getronics as a company that has been successfully integrated from three different origins (Olivetti, Wang, and Getronics), but, by taking a fairly decentralized geographic focus, it has the advantages of having real entrepreneurs, a closeness to the market and customer intimacy in all countries. With that said, there is a lack of cohesion in certain areas: the financial reporting area, including cash management, which I’ll come back to; the IT tools we are using in general; the mix we offer in terms of services in the different countries; and, in a more general sense, within the management team. We discovered that management meetings, common commitments, and a sense of belonging and being on the same page was really experienced across the board. Now, as a result of that, we have identified a number of short-term priorities and medium-term issues: the short-term priorities are clearly linked to our financial situation. To give a quick backdrop, with regard to what was then called the financial restructuring, our predecessors had clearly chosen the bondholders route, which was a proposed debt-to-equity swap that would make the bondholders shareholders of the company while offloading the corresponding debt on the balance sheet. However, this would have been in a manner that would basically have squeezed the former shareholders. Klaas and I believed that we should look into alternatives, if there were alternatives, and we were quite happy to discover that after just one divestment the company had already made last year -- the public business in the U.S. -- at least one other non-core significant business — the HR business—was really something we could not develop outside of Holland . It was organized in a much different way compared to the other business and was much better in the hands of somebody who had this as a core business and would be able to access international funding and development outside of Holland. Since there were quite a number of companies from the industry or financial investors interested in buying this non-core piece and since we also discovered that there were also a few other non-core, mainly financial participations, we stated that the bondholders route was neither the only route, nor indeed the normal route -- nine out of ten people would have opted for divestment of non-core assets to reduce the debt level while strengthening the performance in the core activities. That’s basically what we suggested and we’ve started to accomplish that in three or four steps, each step leading to a significant rebuilding in confidence, at least when you look at the share price, which went from next to nothing, 13 cents, to recently 89 cents. It is still not a lot, but we consider this a positive signal that everybody understands what we are doing.