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This interview is a small excerpt from a comprehensive interview published in The Wall Street Transcript as part of the Consumer Sector, available at (001-212-952-7433) or http://www.twst.com/sectors/consum.html

TWST: Could we begin with a brief overview of Plaut (Frankfurt:918703.F), including the history and core markets that you operate in?

Mr. Kielgas: Plaut is one of the oldest companies on the Neuer Markt, if not the oldest, founded in 1946 by Hans-Georg Plaut, an economic scientist. Plaut was the inventor, if you will, of cost accounting and contribution margin accounting, and he turned this into two types of businesses; a consulting business as well as a software firm, which was at one point larger than SAP. So, we had about a thousand installations of our own accounting software. When we saw SAP growing their market share in the product business, we decided to let go of our own product suite and become a true blue and consulting only firm. This was the case until about 1992 when the company was basically a tenth of the size it is today and was only operating in Central European countries such as Germany, some of Switzerland and then the first outside or international subsidiary was in Austria. At that time, the company decided to internationalize and broaden its spectrum and to expand the offering. So, now we have become a full-solution provider, from strategy consulting through back office solutions, which is still our main business to outsourcing services. Much of it is related to ERP and controlling as our core competency, and the new subject over the last few years has been e-business. In our definition, that means supply chain management and content management. On the other hand, we consider front office solutions to be CRM and online stores. Furthermore, the fifth business line is IT and hosting solutions where we operate seven data centers around the world. Today, we employ 1,700 people and operate in 17 countries, including Australia, where we have a franchise.

TWST: Do you see any opportunities for expansion? Or are you satisfied with the focus of the five business lines for the next couple of years?

Mr. Kielgas: Yes, absolutely. We have been through the phase of expansion, both geographically and in terms of our portfolio. We feel that we are very well suited to be able to answer to every customer's need and do not anticipate growing the spectrum of our lines of business. In fact, we are really trying to improve margins much more than expanding further. Also, because of that expansion and diversification, the two-pronged expansion strategy, we certainly lost some margins that we had in the past. Before the expansion we were at 13-14% operating profit margin and now we are down to pretty low single digit figures. However, it is our intent to grow this now that we have the base, both geographically as well as from the portfolio, to become much more profitable and effective with our core business.

TWST: Will you be aiming to get back up into that 13-14% region?

Mr. Kielgas: Yes, absolutely, this is our aim. We have announced to our investors to reach a 10% operating profit margin by 2003. This means not only on a group-wide level, but in every country that we operate in.

TWST: Has the diversification that you just touched upon given you some resilience, in light of the current global economic environment?

Mr. Kielgas: Yes, it has absolutely helped us because if you are local player in only one subject, you run two risks. Number one, which is the more important one for us, is that your customer will go away from you because he will need that service and will take it from someone else. Risk number two is that you are not immune to any changes in the overall climate. For example, our outsourcing business at present is a pretty good deal for many companies that are trying to cut costs. As well as our controlling core competency, this is where we come from. About 15-18 months ago, nobody would have considered controlling to be sexy at all as everybody was screaming about how you go about new expansion technologies such as e-business. Now, because it is getting more complex, even mid-size customers are growing internationally and they want to reduce that complexity in dealing with their partners. So, we have the responsibility to our clients that we do not just deliver a booklet and then tell them to go implement. We also take the responsibility right down to the outsourcing side, except for the fact that we are not in hardware outsourcing, we focus on the solution and application management part of it.