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Published on March 4, 2008

Vice chairman Narong Charuvalana said the company last year generated only Bt5.3 billion revenue, lower than the expectation of Bt6 billion. In 2006, the company generated around Bt5.7 billion of revenue.

He said that the main reason for lower revenue came from the oil-price rises as well as the world's economic troubles, especially the US sub-prime crisis which caused customers to delay investments in IT last year.

However, the company hopes that this year revenue growth will reach 10 per cent while it will work more to create partnership alliances to drive the growth.

Kitti Techataveekijkul, vice chairman, said that the policy of the new government to encourage more investment in the country would stimulate the market and this was also a key factor to help the company make market expansion.

"With this new policy, we believe we can make our business growth meet the target this year," he added.

Kitti said that this year the company also eyed several business trends that it could develop.

As global warming is now a serious issue for the world, he said the company would also focus on delivering what he called green ICT products to its customers. This included server and storage consolidation, especially for data centres. Kitti said this technology would help businesses to save not only operating costs but also energy.

Kitti speculated that radio frequency identification (RFID) would offer business opportunities for the company to develop systems to serve users' requirements, and this would be a trend this year.

Meanwhile, he sees that the new service-oriented architecture technology would this year start off at a small- and medium-business level and this was an area the company's IT services had to move to.

Metro Systems has divided its business into four groups: Enterprise Systems Group overseeing hardware; Solution Integration Group overseeing software and services; Office Supply Group; and Network Solution and Data Centre products.

Of the total revenue, Office Supply Group has the highest revenue proportion at 40 per cent while Enterprise Systems Group and Solution Integration Group were at 38 per cent and 22 per cent respectively.

Kitti said the company would use the strength of each business unit group to create synergy to provide integration covering consultancy services, hardware and software implementation, and application testing through to training.

Pongpen Sutharoj

The Nation