The Business Year

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IT companies of all types and sizes are helping players across Mozambique realize that digitalization is their best bet against all present and future crises.

Carlos Babo

Managing Director, dataserv

Despite the contraction in the market, dataserv was able to record 45% growth in 2018 and 17.5% in 2019. We have positive expectations for 2020 and the following years. Mozambique has a new government, and the gas industry will have a strong positive impact on the market. dataserv is currently the preferred partner for most multinationals in the country, and we intend to grow our portfolio of clients as the market grows. We want to grow 16-17% in 2020. This is the last year of our three-year growth plan. By June-July 2020, we will draw up another three-year strategic growth plan. We are investing and shifting our company toward being more services oriented, reflecting a global trend in the sector. With 28 years in the market, dataserv is the oldest and largest IT company in Mozambique. The company is based in Maputo with offices in Beira, Tete, and Pemba and plans to open in Nacala within the next year. Through our footprint, we are able to cover the whole country, both in terms of products and services. We are partners with major vendors, such as HP, HPE, Cisco, Sophos, and Microsoft. We cover the whole value chain of an IT-imagined project. We also provide high-value services on the side of cybersecurity, a new sector that is growing in importance. The company originally served the public sector, but it has increasingly focused on corporate business as its main target. We also have a retail space showroom for our own customers, although this is not our main focus.

Joaquim Tobias Dai

Executive Director, Asseco PST

Over the last few years, the company has gone through major structural changes. In 2016, Exictos became part of the Asseco Group, a multinational group with a presence across Europe, the US, and Africa with over 2,000 personnel. This has given us the opportunity to step up our standard of service to an international level, evolving our technology and skills. Our technicians cover all areas, such as infrastructure, consultancy, and IT developments. Our strategy is two-fold. On the one hand, we want to consolidate our existing partnerships with banks. We see ourselves not as mere suppliers of banks, but rather as partners. We want to keep developing and growing with our clients. We are the only technology system in Mozambique that speaks Portuguese and English. Our consultants are well trained, having gathered relevant experience abroad. We want to be the preferred local IT partner for new banks in the country. We definitely want to look outside of the financial sector and extend our services to other sectors. Thanks to our merger with Asseco, we can now enter other markets with confidence, such as e-governance. We have gathered a high degree of relevant experience in assisting governments in the implementation of e-payments. We do see willingness from the government’s side to engage in e-government solutions; however, because Mozambique is such a small economy, and the government has scarce resources, e-government can only be applied gradually, step by step. This is a long-term project that requires proper designing, so we do not want to rush things.

Salvador Adriano

CEO, Salvador Adriano

Internet Solutions is part of the Dimension Data group, which has a large presence in Africa and the Middle East. The company has been in Mozambique as Internet Solutions for the last 11 years, following the rebranding when Dimension Data bought the previous ISP, called INTRA. We were first attracted to Mozambique because of its double-digit economic growth. Even with all the challenges since then, Mozambique is the place to be. We have spread our presence across the country, through points of presence in seven provinces plus our headquarters in Maputo. The quality of our service is our main differentiator. We have been awarded the best ISP in the country by PMR for the last seven years. We offer a number of solutions, ranging from direct internet to multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) services. We can do backup of client solutions and virtual machines like cloud services so that we can host the applications here, and customers can use the applications in their offices. We do colocation and are active in cybersecurity, which is an increasingly important priority for Mozambican businesses. We have been serving the Maputo offices of Exxon, Anadarko, and ENI. We want to move to managed services, taking over the full IT department of banks and companies. We are currently rebranding to the mother company, together with other subsidiaries. The rebranding will be implemented until October 2020 in all countries where Internet Solutions is present, namely South Africa, Mozambique, Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria.

Ricardo Parreira

CEO, PHC Software

We are a software company focusing on ERP management systems. We develop the software and train our partners about managing one’s company with the best software. We want to deliver the best customer experience, empowering our customers with the means to achieve the best cost management. In our 30-year history, we have expanded our presence to five countries with six offices; we sell through a network of 400 distributors and have customers in 25 countries. Our annual turnover is approximately EUR12.5 million. Mozambique was our market outside of Portugal. In times of crises, companies predominantly make investments with a quick return. Whatever could be maintained like before remained unchanged. However, companies also had to be more agile and make good decisions to stay in business. ERP systems are a way of improving management efficiency and costs and thus represent a quick return. For this reason, our performance was not negatively affected by the crisis; in fact, we saw some growth in our operations, and we expect to maintain that going forward. After the COVID-19 crisis is over, we will a see a set of new habits being created, repeated, and accepted as standard modus operandi. While this might at first be a big challenge for companies that used to buy and sell and do their business face-to-face, we will have to learn to live in that world, and there is no going back. I foresee a huge evolution in sectors like services and retail, where the customer experience will be irrevocably touched by these changes.

Luí­s Leal Leonor

FOUNDER & CEO, 2IBI SOFTWARE

We started 2iBi Software in Beira in 2012, mainly serving businesses in the central provinces of Sofala, Manica, and Tete. We specialized in logistics, fumigation, transportation, and inspection, and started developing specific models and software to help businesses run their operations. Our target is medium-sized companies, since large corporates usually have their own systems. We have also prepared software for some NGOs. We first opened in Beira because there was a specific need for a company to develop and provide support with ERP software, especially Primavera. We grew solidly in the first five years, and in general Beira offers amazing growth opportunities for different industries. We are the only IT company dedicated to implementing ERP software and developing software. We are pleased to partner with some of the other companies to offer combined services. However, from where I stand, business opportunities in the central region are already saturated. For this reason, in 2016 we opened in Maputo and started getting a few clients in Pemba. We are awaiting signs of the exponential growth that will be prompted by LNG as well as other big agriculture projects to start proper expansion in Cabo Delgado. We are currently launching Primavera on the cloud, a Windows application that is the most popular ERP in Mozambique. The cloud is increasingly becoming a priority among Mozambican businesses, even despite the reliability of internet connections. We are pushing people to move swiftly to cloud solutions.

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