The business development team went through an accelerated process of changing and experimenting with the way we approach customers in 2021. It has been a year dedicated to learning how to use customer profiling applications and tools, strategic planning tools, and working more systematically with CRM. All this discipline in execution produced results especially in the second part of the year when we managed to recover the harder beginning of the year.
The business development team opened a number of 1,573 opportunities, of which 676 were closed with “awarded” status. We have managed 103 clients. Of these, 35 were new customers. We completed the year with a RON 11 million turnover and a RON 6 million gross margin.
In addition to the current activity of the business development team, it is worth mentioning that last year we focused on the opportunities offered by European projects through partnerships with consulting companies. There are 6 such opportunities that we are actively working on, with an estimated value of EUR 2.5 million, of which we hope to gain a significant share.
Being one of the important players in the Romanian CyberSecurity training market, with young sales teams and instructors, with over 18 years of experience and more than 6,000 students trained over time, CLC provides training and education services whose main goal is to train in the field of information security, audit and evaluation of information systems. Such training is intended for both managers and information security professionals who want to be up to date with the latest technologies and solutions.
In addition to the traditional sales, through the effort of the whole team, we managed to win three important projects following the participation in public tenders:
- Training services in the field of cyber security necessary for the implementation of the project called “Extension of the investigative capabilities of the cyber defense system at the level of the Ministry of Internal Affairs CYBINT, Sipoca Code / MySMIS 858/134962, LOT 4 – Advanced course in computer networks” – fully developed in 2021,
- High-level cybersecurity training services for the implementation of the project “Updating and developing the national system of protection of IT&C infrastructures with critical values for national security against cyber threats” – running from November 2021 until June 2022,
- “IDEA – Innovate, Discover, Evolve, Apply” – occurring in early 2022.
In September, we started the integration process, which involved, in addition to continuing the sales of courses, the adaptation to new tools and working procedures.
Overall, 2021 was a year of reconstruction and sustained effort, a year of growing business and people. The changes started in 2020 have gained consistency, and we have dedicated our efforts to consolidating Equatorial’s positioning strategy as a specialist in developing human skills for Team Team Leaders in IT organizations. The repositioning of Equatorial as a provider of soft skills for IT organizations materialized by gaining 7 new customers in the IT industry. The FutureSkills collaborative learning platform and the VRunners game are the basis for the awarded projects.
This year we also contributed to the development of the next generations, with two gamified projects in which we used the VRunners platform:
- Happy Teens, the first project intended for preventing depression among adolescents, in partnership with the Happy Minds Association,
- Pride-U VRunners, within the POCU (“Human Capital Operational Project”) project carried out by the Bucharest Academy of Economic Sciences.
The year 2021 was the year of growth at a faster pace than expected, mainly due to the expansion of the course catalogue (645 course modules in Romanian) and the more intense use of the LMS platform. The pandemic the rate of use of online courses was about 15% (in the best cases it reached 20% of the number of employees of a company), whereas in 2021 it accelerated the trend of 2020 related to the higher rate of fund access (even by more than 80% in some companies).
The industries that have chosen to use e-learning solutions in 2021 are: Banking; FMCG; Automotive; Oil and Gas; Utilities; Manufacturing; Retail; Services; Insurance.
In the second half of the year we turned our attention to public administrations where we launched pilot projects in the last months of the year and the results are above expectations, the adoption of online courses is at a very high level, over 60% of employees participated in the pilot projects they accessed online courses in the first two months.