Cerillion plc (LON:CER) Chief Executive Officer Louis Hall caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the 31% increase in the customer sales pipeline and the overheating in the IT and tech sectors.
Q1: I notice there has been a large 31% increase in Cerillion’s new customer sales pipeline. Does this mean you expect to see strong new orders in the second half of the year?
A1: Yes, I think as you say, it’s been communicated in the announcement that the new customer sales pipeline has jumped significantly in the first half, we’ve seen this big 31% increase, giving us a big bulge in that pipeline, just up to £172 million.
It would be reasonable to expect that in the second half, the bulge will start to drop out into new business so yes, we are quite hopeful about the prospects for some new customer contract wins in the second half.
Q2: We’re hearing a lot about overheating in the IT and tech sectors, is Cerillion experiencing these issues, and if you are, what are you doing to deal with them?
A2: I think it’s a topic that all tech companies are concerned about right now.
We have been attacking this aggressively for quite a while looking at the balance between where we have our people so we have people in India, we have people in the UK so we’re looked at moving the balance of people between the UK and India to an extent. Also, we’ve opened a new centre in Bulgaria in Sofia back in September and we’re now starting to wear that one quite rapidly so that’s becoming another useful alternative base for us to develop new skills and bring on board new talent and help address some of the overheating in other regions.
We’re also looking at opening satellite centres in India away from our main base in Pune and that, I think, is going to be quite successful in terms of, again helping manage the high risk of attrition we see at the moment in the currently very hot labour markets in technology but also in terms of dealing with the inflationary issues.
So, it is something that we’re spending a lot of time on but actually, in the second half the numbers that we’ve published, labour costs have gone down slightly through this policy of managing where we deploy our resources.
