Business

Monday February 23, 2009

SAS’ strategy in retaining clients

By LEONG HUNG YEE


It believes in listening to its customers

GROWING and retaining customer base are SAS Malaysia’s key priorities to remaining resilient, according to managing director Jimmy Cheah.

“To date, we have successfully retained 99% of our customers. This is a testament to our successful strategy that is based on listening to our customers and exceeding return on investment expectations,” he told StarBiz recently.

Cheah said even in a challenging economy, the group was continuously looking at opportunities in new market segments and expected its customer base to grow by 30% this year.

SAS recorded strongest growth last year in analytics, data mining and solutions. SAS products help organisations keep current customers and win new ones, manage risk and optimise processes.

Jimmy Cheah

Among its clients are Tesco Stores, F&N, Coca-Cola, EON Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, Penang Adventist Hospital, KPJ Hospitals and the Inland Revenue Board.

“Although we are projecting softer growth in 2009, we expect the growth trend to continue as organisations increase their need for business analytics for customer, information, risk and performance management,” Cheah said.

“In turbulent times, there is a greater need than ever for customers to understand what drives costs, profit and value in their organisation,” he added.

The Cary, North Carolina-based SAS Institute Inc recently reported US$2.26bil in revenue last year, up 5.1% from its 2007 results.

This was the 33rd straight year of revenue growth for the company in the worst economy most can remember.

Driven by the challenging economic climate, customers globally turned to SAS’ market-leading business analytics to derive money-saving and money-making insights from ever-growing volumes of data.

Globally, risk management solutions revenue were up 28%, and optimisation software sales increased 18%. Total revenue from analytics and data mining rose more than 15%.

The analytical software giant gained 2,600 new customers from around the world in 2008.

Although the economy is predicted to remain challenging throughout the first half of 2009, SAS will not curtail its research and development investments.

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