NorCom reports stable earnings despite lower sales

Nevertheless, NorCom was able to maintain EBITDA at the previ-ous year’s level of EUR 1.1 million (EUR 1.2 million). At just under 8 percent, the EBIT margin is one percentage point below the previous year’s level.

Business development 2018 The reason for the positive operating result was stable busi-ness in the high-margin product area. Although NorCom recorded a decline in sales of around 1.4 million euros for the major customer Bundesagentur für Arbeit – in particular, the pleasing development of the EAGLE project at Audi compensated for this in parts.

Projects around the big data analysis software DaSense suffered under the crisis on the automobile market: Project shifts, aus-terity measures and budget cuts determined the negotiations. Nevertheless, NorCom was able to successfully implement numer-ous smaller big data analytics projects with DaSense and thus keep sales in this area stable.

"In terms of revenue growth, 2018 did not quite live up to its promise," comments Viggo Nordbakk, NorCom’s CEO. "The weakening business of automobile manufacturers thwarted us. Not all or-ders were executed as planned and sometimes less than ex-pected."

However, NorCom implemented important strategic goals in 2018 as planned, as Nordbakk continues: "In 2018, we had set our-selves four major topics: for our software solutions DaSense and EAGLE to achieve the partner ability to convince strategic distribution partners to work together consolidate our custom-ers and make a positive contribution to earnings. We were able to implement all of this in 2018: EAGLE impresses with its high quality and DaSense can go into sales as a complete solution through partners. With AVL, we have been able to win one of the most prestigious companies as a partner. We were able to hold all existing customers in 2018 and generate follow-up orders."

Accordingly, NorCom made major investments in 2018 in order to make DaSense fit for partnerships. Furthermore, we invested in the continuous quality improvement of our products.

Comment and outlook

"The time was ripe for EAGLE in 2018 and we made headway quick-ly and successfully. In the next phase, EAGLE will be used by all more than 20,000 employees in the "Technical Development" department. EAGLE will manage Audi AG’s complete technical doc-umentation and ensure compliance with all requirements. Docu-ments are managed in EAGLE according to the "Classification System for Records" (CSR). The CSR defines standards for the classification, processing, storage and timely deletion of data and documents. Especially temporary documents are screened out early and garbage is avoided. Documents to be deleted ensure that they can no longer be recovered – especially since the en-try into force of the GDPR, this is a relevant point. With this installation we have an excellent reference project for further marketing ", says Viggo Nordbakk.

"At DaSense, it is important for us to be present on the market and to remain active in sales through partners and to generate other use cases. We want to be able to offer as soon as the de-mand is there. For example, at the beginning of the year we were able to set up demo installations at two promising compa-nies and are also looking forward to interesting projects in the second quarter. "