This was SIT distribution first full financial year and great progress was made during this year, one of the major decisions taken during this year was to implement an ERP system to manage the company's overall business from sales, stock and company financials.  It was not only a very crucial decision to make but also a heavy investment by the company to ensure it had the right systems in place to support its young fledgeling business, it also demonstrated a great insight by the company to implement such a system. The planning stage of the system involved everyone in the company and it took over six months to complete because this is the most critical part of any ERP implementation.

Gridz ME - an IT Services company was appointed to manage the project for SIT Distribution and the whole process was conducted, implemented and "going live" date executed without any impact on the day to day running of the business which was a great tribute to the SIT Distribution team and Gridz ME team.

Another major decision taken in 2009 was to take control of local deliveries in the UAE, this was the result of our understanding and appreciation of our customer needs and thus SIT Distribution took on board the recruitment of our own delivery fleet delivering directly and on daily basis to our customers as and when required and the quantity needed.

SIT Distribution also managed to ship more than 85,000 smartphone devices into the ME market again this was a great achievement for the company considering the tough competition in this segment, the quarterly product launches and here I would like to extend my thanks and gratitude to our employees, customers and HTC Taiwan management for their support and commitment which enabled SIT Distribution to achieve such a major milestone in the region and in its young history.

It is difficult to make financial comparisons with last year as this is the first full year of trading for SIT Distribution, however, on an annualised basis the financial performance represents some 30% growth on last year, this was driven by new generation of HTC products, availability and customer acceptance of the new features of Smartphone devices.

These are tough market conditions considering the world economic situation and our region is no longer immune from world events regardless of whether financial or otherwise, our customers continued to invest in the right areas of the business and rightly so enabling their businesses to withstand such challenges and ensuring the local business in transacted with the right approach.

This year SIT Distribution also saw few employees leave the business and many new ones join, we welcomed Cyrus Roche as Marketing Manager and many others and as usual we always thank the ones who played their part but decided their future is somewhere else and welcome all the new ones and wish them a successful future.

I with the rest of our employees look forward to 2010 with a great deal of optimism.