SIT Distribution continued to make steady progress in the business with many new initiatives and activities across the GCC countries a decision to open a legal entity in Kuwait was executed and the office established, full details of this are in the news section, again this was another genuine step to bring SIT Distribution closer to its customers in the country in which we operate, later in the year full functional service capabilities were added to the office enabling our Kuwait customers to have a local service support for products purchased in Kuwait.

SIT distribution managed to ship over 100,000 devices into the region a major milestone in terms of products consumed within the GCC economies and a tribute to SIT Distribution in terms of its abilities to manage its business even during tough times of product constraints, during the year we suffered from product availability making our growth in terms of units a modest 15%.

SIT Distribution having operated in Jordan with a legal entity decided to pull out of local presence in this market, SIT Distribution plan was a sound one but the environment of doing business in country were tough ones and our local management was unable to widen our activities within Jordan, and having persevered for two years it was decided to pull out of local presence in Jordan and concentrate our efforts within the GCC countries.  Our believe is that "its better to have tried and failed than not tried at all" an expensive lesson both in-terms of time, effort, resources and finance.

In the UAE SIT Distribution increased its local delivery infrastructure by 50% and with this we were able to increase our flexibility and ability to meet our customer demands.  On the service front we increased the engineering capacity by 50% and our efforts in improving our service capabilities were also enhance with further investment in tools, increased service parts holding and swap units.

In Saudi,SIT Distribution opened two new service centres one in Riyadh and one in Jeddah under "HTC Care" branding as these centres were dedicated to HTC support only, full range of services were offered through these centres including service, software update, health check of devices as well as normal warranty and swap out services.

Within the Marketing Department SIT Distribution launched a trade marketing unit which was a fully customer engaging unit supporting our customers in their retail stores, promoters and merchandisers were recruited,  trained and deployed across many of our retail customers.

There was also a big change within our leading vendor reporting and for the first time the local HTC office instead of reporting directly to Taiwan was now reporting to the UK, these changes are initiated by the vendor for their own structures and alignment and we very much hope the impact will be a positive one for both SIT Distribution and our channel partners.

Fewer people left SIT Distribution in 2010 than in previous year and we were able to attract few good ones into the organisation which pleases me greatly because in general we prefer to hold on to our people but in reality no organisation can hold people from wanting to do what they believe is good for them even in reality this may not be true but you have no option but to let people do what they believe to be good for them, however, welcoming new enthusiastic people is not only challenging but also rewarding for they try to do different things which lead to different results, they also bring new dynamics into the company which can only be good for the organisation if the energy and enthusiasm is managed and channelled correctly.

Again we always wish our departing colleagues the best in their new endeavours and we welcome our new ones and look forward to their positive contribution to the business of SIT Distribution and finally I would like to thank our customers, HTC Taiwan and local HTC office and our people for their positive contribution towards our continued success during 2010 and I am truly looking forward to an exciting 2011.