Strategic Sourcing Europe

So, this is where Hubwoo is ending 2006 : 4,6% growth, 32M€ revenue and… a 500K€ first-time positive EBITDA for the whole year! Moreover is Alain Andréoli, CEO of Hubwoo, announcing a black EBIT for 2007 and looking at what Alain said and did (35M€ massive impairment, cleaning-up all financial negative weight) so far , I am inclined to believe HUBWOO is in good shape to make it even if, in this type of short press release, the devil lies in the details. Nevertheless, this is just a great job and the whole team awards big congrats! … I know some, on the other side of the Atlantic, that might be… kind-of-jealous…

Now, a couple of open questions:

1. Although an annual positive EBITDA means something, Hubwoo growth is much lower than Quadrem’s 18% (read press-release),
2. I am surprised and positively impressed that Hubwoo won the so-called global-deal with Honeywell; I thought that Quadrem, although looking mining-field specialised still, has a better global presence and a much more impressive supplier network (47000 compared to 15000 for Hubwoo). This is nevertheless an sound demonstration of Hubwoo commercial and persuasiveness capabilities,
3. I’m wondering how ‘bad’ will be competition next year between Hubwoo, IBX, Quadrem and Perfect mainly: will Hubwoo manage to retain its current customers and protect its pricing levels and schema? True, Hubwoo cut down running costs dramatically (50%), but will this be enough as competition was used to propose prices 5 times lower?
4. I’m not feeling the expansion of services of Hubwoo – with Procuri primarily and its major development-investment for the enablement of  a lucrative supplier network -  as positive as it sounds. Although I am a strong believer of the value of a shared supplier-network database for prequal purposes, it is a totally different ball game compared toeProcurement: Hubwoo might loose its focus and competitive advantage of being a eProcurement specialist. On the other hand, anyone can understand it is a way to mitigate my remark #2 (price and client erosion), trying to grab the low-hanging-fruits of a complementary-offering partnership. Actually, have you heard of any cross-sale between Procuri and Hubwoo? would be good to know…