July 5 , 2006
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It gives me a great pleasure to welcome you all to the 20th Annual General Meeting of Kale Consultants Limited. The Director's report, Auditors report and audited accounts with notes thereon are with you for some time and request your kind permission to take them as read.
Airlines worldwide have reported bullish outlooks as strong revenue trends are expected to continue through the summer and into the rest of the year. They seem to be seeing the Light at the end of five year tunnel as per IATA report. The revenues have grown over 10% which is almost double of the normal historic average and the profitability seems to be holding steady in spite of spiraling fuel costs. All this was possible due to the better economy, concerted efforts by the industry to improve productivity and reduce costs.
This combination of little capacity growth, over 10% revenue growth, significant cost reductions, and watchful expenditure has eased some pressures on the cash flow generation which is making the industry rest on slightly better footing.
Your company has helped the industry in implementing some of these initiatives through efficiency improvement offerings as well as enabling them to convert some of the fixed expenditure to revenue based variable expenditure. This combination is a powerful one and our results show this in the year completed.
The highlights for the year are that of promises kept!
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Financial: |
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Revenue growth of 27% |
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PBIDT growth of over 50% |
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PBT growth of over 90% |
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Recommending Dividend of 12.5% |
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Customers: |
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Signed multiyear contracts with existing and new customers |
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Total client base increased to over 60 |
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Order book of over 2.5 Billion over next few years |
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Over 37% growth for annuity type of revenues |
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People: |
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The total strength of the professional now exceeds 800. |
As you would observe it was a year of progress on all the perspectives and we plan to build upon these successes. Our focuses on Travel & transportation segments coupled with innovative “pay for value received” mode of offerings have aligned our goals with those of our clients. This in turn has provided us with multiyear relationships with our clients enabling planned sustainable growth for years to come.
Your Company now offers comprehensive suite of solutions
for the Airline and travel industry. These include PRA solutions,
Cargo solutions, Travel solutions, Managed process services.
These offering lead to high end value creations for our client
partners and provides us a sustained competitive advantage.
The spectrum of flexible services provides our client a tool
-to meet the challenging situation of meeting the growing
expectations of their customers, employees and investors alike.
Your company continues to play an important role in global initiatives for Travel & transportation industry. It is actively participating in IATA initiatives like NFP, E-freight, Cargo-2000, Simplify the Business (StB). Incidentally Kale is proud to be the only Indian company selected for the StB worldwide initiative by IATA. This would position us as key player for implementing new initiatives by airlines as part of StB.
The growth of traffic, cargo and Internet travel products and services provide an excellent platform to your company to leverage this opportunity. The only wild card is of course the oil prices – which would be impacting the economy in general and our industry in particular. We expect to grow on all counts and measures for the years ahead even though we may experience little “turbulences” on our way to our relentless pursuit of pioneering solutions for our client partners.
I thank all of our stakeholders- Clients, Colleagues and Corporate stockholders, business partners, Bankers, RBI, NASSCOM, and various government authorities for the constant encouragement and support throughout the year. I also like to record the appreciation for the efforts of all the Kale'ites- for their total dedication and hard work. I am sure that with this continued support we would see the results of all our hard work paying off year after year.
Thank You,
Narendra H. Kale
Chairman,
Kale Consultants Limited |
