IBX undisclosed its 07Q4 newsletter and confirmed its ambition to reach 34M€ revenue at year-end, as forecasted initially. Wow, this is a great, impressive and steady two-digit growth rate for 2007. Have a look at the graph below, it might speak to you more than any word.
On the other side and in the meantime (sept. 2007), cc-hubwoo was proud to announce reaching a positive but tiny-tiny EBITDA of 0,5M€ and 16M€ revenues for 07H1.
Huh!? this is -4% revenue growth compared to 06H1. Do I miss something or what? Despite the cute and cheering positive EBITDA, I don’t see the promised bright future within arm-lenght:
- cc-hubwoo is lacking critical growth to become sustainable
- originally Alain Andréoli was targetting 44M€ revenue for the full-year 2007, meaning a two digit growth which is not realistic any more (read IBX vs cc-hubwoo post I wrote last june).
- At last, yesterday December 18th 2007, cc-hubwoo announced a weird “transition in leadership”: Alain Andréoli is leaving the ship (he has accepted the position of President Europe, Middle-East and Africa for Sun Microsystems) and being replaced by cc-hubwoo’s CFO Mark Williams.
Moreover, for anyone used to business life-cycle, those 3 signals (lack of revenue growth, missed revenue target and transition to a CFO leadership) are alarming: cc-hubwoo objective is not anymore to drive-up revenues (how do you think a CFO will drive-up market growth?). no, the truth is elsewhere: either cc-hubwoo is now committed to an M&A processing (SAP, IBX … who knows) or… to its final restructuration. I cross my fingers.