Milan, 15 November 2018. The third quarter of the current year finished a month ago, and now it is the time to take a look at how it went. With just two months left in 2018, global businesses are slowly preparing to dive into the 2019 year, the year of the Earth Pig.
Today, we talked with Uroš Čimžar, the CEO of the DHH.
He shared with us some details regarding projects that took place within DHH group of companies during July, August, and September. Uroš also shared some of his expectations concerning the performance of DHH in the near future.
How did the third quarter go for DHH? Please tell me shortly about the projects that took place during these recent months?
Uroš Čimžar: “During the third quarter, one of DHH’s priorities was the acquisition of mCloud in Serbia. I am quite glad about this initiative since it comes as our next step concerning the consolidation of the Serbian market. Before this move, our presence in Serbia was quite limited, and the acquisition of mCloud was enormous progress towards expanding our reach in this country. With mCloud acquisition, we were fortunate. Along with the company, we got a team of true professionals.
In Q3 2018, we also set up first cloud servers on our new cloud infrastructure in Zagreb, and this is something that we hope can bring us revenues in the future. We are planning to build some services on top of that infrastructure.
Moving on, DHH’s start-up Sysbee started promoting itself as a new brand, as they took part in some conferences. DHH.si began to the pilot project focused on cloud services in Slovenia, which is mostly aimed at selling cloud services with Windows.
We are addressing the new market in Slovenia with this initiative. Our brands in Slovenia were up until now serving primarily web-based customer needs, and with this, we now also support needs of internal IT departments of various companies, from big to small.”
As you also previously said, DHH planned to improve the collaboration with local tech communities. Are there any updates regarding this project?
Uroš Čimžar: “We are making some progress regarding this idea. In Croatia, we are in the process of talks about the support for the series of lectures in different cities. We are planning to have these in place also in Serbia and Bosnia.
The key message of these lectures would be focused on the education and promotion of how one can become a freelancer in the global market. We are still in the process of discussing content specifics.
In this context, in Slovenia, I am aware that we have involved a local company that will help us develop one of the products that we will be launching next year. We slowly involve local communities within DHH structure as well, thus consolidating our ground in these emerging markets.”
I know that DHH strives to support and develop future leaders within its community. Are there any initiatives that are taking place in support of this idea?
Uroš Čimžar: “Yes, there are! At DHH, 3 or 4 times a year, we are hosting the DHH summit. It is an internal event that gathers key people from all DHH brands. Our next summit is scheduled to take place in a few weeks, at the end of November.
We decided to extend the upcoming summit by one day. During this 2-day summit, we will have the leadership workshop, which will be led by external entrepreneurship coaches to form a new generation of leaders within the DHH.
As an ultimate result, we hope to have some input from our future leaders and CEOs concerning topics they would like to learn about in the future so that we can arrange some additional workshops for them.”
What are the plans of DHH for the upcoming quarter?
Uroš Čimžar: “I would like the companies’ CEOs to focus on growing their competencies in sales and marketing fields. Also, the last quarter of 2018 means planning of the budget for 2019. We will be preparing plans for portfolio companies for 2019, as well.
I also believe that the email marketing project in Slovenia will be launched during the fourth quarter. In addition, Tophost will launch their project that is related to security and new power features.
In Serbia, we will be continuing working towards the consolidation of our position, with now two active companies in the market.”
Are there any big plans for DHH in 2019?
Uroš Čimžar: “DHH is the company that grows in two ways – on one side, organically, and on another front, through mergers and acquisitions. I am expecting that we will be growing significantly in both directions in 2019, as well.
There definitely will be some challenges that will have to be faced. Some of such initiatives include the regulatory compliance, and we are determined to ensure the maximum compliance level possible.
Because the DHH combines many different emerging regions, each of these areas has its regulatory peculiarities that have to be taken into account.”
Talking about regulations, how did DHH manage to comply with the GDPR?
Uroš Čimžar: “We have “survived” the first round of these regulations quite successfully. We are still working on compliance specifics internally. As we are working our way towards the full compliance, I believe we can use it as a competitive advantage in the future. I also believe that this trend will become globally recognized.”
