The strong increase of revenue and profitability is expected from the currently executed acquisitions – said Zoltán Jutasi, CEO of Synergon Group. In the near future, further acquisitions are expected, he added.

The company anticipated the purchase of other businesses the other day, and now announced the acquisition of half a dozen companies. Why have you bought up these particular six businesses?

We have examined more than twenty companies this year. The reason why these companies were bought up by Synergon is that from financial, professional and organizational perspectives they fit into our portfolio, and we could make a deal with them the fastest. In fact, with the purchase of one company we acquired ownership in four other enterprises, and became owners of them.

What is the purpose of the acquisitions?

The purpose is to grow, of course. As far as we are concerned, with the purchase of these companies the Group’s revenue and EBIDTA will probably increase with at least 3 billion and 400-450 million HUF, respectively. In recent years the IT sector had to face severe problems. The majority of clients postponed or even cancelled their IT-related investments. Apart from the declining revenues, collaterals also shrank, and the sometimes competition became unbearable occasionally. Companies in the IT sector had to break out; they needed to find new business models. In this situation acquisitions have a concentrating effect on the market. Some transactions can bring such competencies into the Group that would be almost impossible to develop internally nowadays. Furthermore, not just the competencies, but the performance and profit are also acquired with the transactions. We don’t have the resources for experimenting these days; we go after businesses only that have already proven themselves on the market. One way to reach them is to purchase them. The organizational changes aftermath can further increase the results. It is especially true for these transactions that “one plus one equals three”. We created a holding company specialized in investing in IT by purchasing purely IT companies for the purpose of buying companies, and sell them depending on our possibilities. In the longer term, our goal might be to become a market leader on the Hungarian IT infrastructure service provider area. According to the study of the International Data Corporation (IDC), NKS is the biggest player on the cloud market in Hungary, foregoing even the multinational companies in this field. If I wanted to put it simply, I would say our purpose is value creation; building up chain processes, as well as the genuine integration of business processes through the subsidiaries. I believe that the transactions have contributed to that to a great extent.

How Infirio Ltd. fits into the strategy? Isn’t this company an odd one among the others?

Infirio is part of the Wiera Group, which is a dynamically developing player on the digital display market. The group’s main strategic field is infocommunications; within the frame of this we develop a complex passenger informing system called FUTÁR for instance. As part of the project we will equip more than 200 visualization devices worth hundreds of millions of HUF. We used similar devices in our projects in Győr and Sopron. Similar projects will be launched in Bulgaria next year; here we plan to apply with our own company’s devices. Besides, more than 1,200 visualization devices can be found in the network of Infirio. We see a great opportunity in this.

What are your plans for 2013?

The Group is looking forward to a very busy year in 2013. We will pursue the acquisitions; we have more companies in our range of horizon, but due to lack of time and energy we couldn’t manage to finish negotiations with them yet. The integration of the current investments will be a rough task to do, we expect a lot from the new colleagues. However, I believe that the Group’s structure gives the opportunity for both the colleagues and leaders to do a good job, and don’t get lost in the jungle of such a big corporation. Another major challenge for us is the data park investment, and also we should not forget about our applications for IT tenders in Hungary, and the currently running FUTÁR project, which we treat as top priority. In the consecutive year we want to achieve more, and it is true for our Bulgarian and newly forming Ukrainian subsidiaries.