- Share price: 145p (+5% today with announcement of major contract win)
- No. of shares: 29.5 million
- Market cap: £43 million
Cerillion (AIM:CER), the AIM-listed software company, reported its final results on Monday 27th November. I had the pleasure of speaking with the company's CEO, Louis Hall, and CFO, Oliver Gilchrist. You'll find the transcript below.
This interview was originally published to subscribers at grahamneary.com.
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Q. Louis or Oliver, would you like to spend 30 seconds or a minute giving a brief overview?
Louis: Cerillion provides enterprise billing and CRM solutions to the global telecoms market. These are large enterprise software systems and we say they are mission-critical because they are systems our customers have to have. You can’t be in business in telco without one of these systems.
It does everything from working out how much customers are spending, on-boarding customers in the first place, and monitoring customers’ use of the networks, contact centre, CRM, service provisioning - the whole nine yards. And these are typically very sticky relationships. Most of our customers have been customers for a very long time. The customer base is very important, as the existing base generates around 70% of our revenue each year - sometimes more than that.
Q. This is ancient history, but what was the rationale for becoming an independent company back in 1999?
Louis: In 1999, I was working for what was then Logica, which then became Logica CMG, running Logica’s telecoms products unit. This included a billing system, fraud system and other bits and pieces. At that time, Logica really wanted to be a consultancy, a global consultancy, selling very high-end software services, which, before off-shoring, the money was in, arguably, in selling ‘bodies’, not in selling products. Whereas we were very focused in our division on products. We believed the future was in selling software products not people and so we didn’t gel with Logica’s strategy. We made an offer; they agreed to sell and that’s how we started Cerillion.
Of course, the software has all been redeveloped a number of times since then but the core footprint is quite similar to what we were doing in Logica back in the day.
Q. So it was a different vision between yourself and the broader Logica approach?
Louis: Yes, at that time, at that time.
Q.…
