Cerillion plc (LON:CER) Chief Executive Officer Louis Hall caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview earlier in the year to discuss the completion of a strategically important implementation for Norlys, what’s next and what we can expect from the company in 2022.
Q1: First off, congratulations on the recent go live at Norlys. What makes this strategically important as described in the announcement?
A1: First of all, this is the completion of the first stage of a broader set of implementations that will include migrating the Norlys service provider brands onto Cerillion’s CRM and billing platform as well.
Secondly, there’s a growing trend in the telecom industry towards structural separation between infrastructure owners and service providers, just as in the Norlys case. So, we now have a proof point in Denmark with Norlys and also with another customer of ours called OpenNet. OpenNet is the wholesale business that brings together the different infrastructure owners who provide their infrastructure onto the platform to be used by the whole range of different infrastructure providers, and those of course include Norlys. So, I think this experience puts us in a very good position with respect to other countries that are undergoing or will be undergoing similar structural separation.
Thirdly, I think this is just an indication of the increasing size of the new customer deals that we are doing and building on and confirms how well suited our pre-integrated product suite is to these larger and more diverse businesses with more complex requirements.
Q2: From the announcement, it sounds like the relationship with Norlys is growing. Can you give us an indication of what might be coming next?
A2: As I said, this is the first of a set of migrations of different Norlys brands and we’re also, at the moment, in the process of implementing the migration of the service provider brands of Norlys onto our platform. We also see a lot of potential for wider collaboration going forward as Norlys build their businesses, both in Denmark and potentially beyond, they certainly have a lot of ambitions.
Q3: Finally, this news comes hot off the heels of some very impressive annual results published in November. What can we expect from Cerillion in 2022?
A3: I think what we saw in the year to October 2021, our financial ‘21, was that the business has transformed from a growth rate of around 10% top line year on year to 25% top line year on year, with PBT increasing significantly more than that.
I think that what we now expect to see is for that trajectory to continue at the same pace and that we would see that growth rate sustained going forward which would put us in a very different place to where we’ve been since IPO in 2016.
