Lantek’s Board of Directors together with the National Managers of Lantek’s worldwide branch offices held the 7th International Meeting at the Alava Technology Park during the first week of February 2006. The aim of this meeting was to analyse the company’s results in 2005 and to establish the main objectives and strategic lines for 2006. Lantek’s turnover in 2005 was 7,3 Million €, 18% more than in 2004. Lantek managed to bring 854 new customers in 2005 and right now more than 5.400 companies in 76 countries rely on Lantek as their sheet metal CAD/CAM software provider. Many of these new customers are located in the Africa, Middle East, Asia and Australia, where Lantek’s presence grew significantly during 2005. The company is proud of being a market leader in countries such as Spain with more than 1.475 customers, Italy with more than 800 customers, France with more than 550 customers, Brazil with more than 325 customers and South Korea and Portugal with 225 customers. Furthermore, Germany with 340 customers, and UK with 200 customers have seen Lantek’s presence increase significantly. “Overall, 2005 was a very positive year for Lantek, since we met our main targets and the final results were above our own expectations. If we take into consideration that 2005 has not seen a complete recovery of the industry, the significant growth we had during this year clearly shows that we are working in the right direction. Our market share is constantly increasing and our leadership in the industry is stronger year by year. The strategy we defined several years ago is the key to the current success, and is based on three main concepts: R&D investment and international presence, along with staff satisfaction. We could have never made it without the strong commitment of our 100 employees. In 2005, Lantek continued with its policy to invest 15% of our turnover in Research and Development activities. 10 new programmers were employed at our headquarters in Spain. Thanks to this, the evolution of our software products is very significant and our current and future customers can be sure that they have a first class product. We continue to increase our market share and leadership in Lantek’s traditional markets such as Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Portugal and Latin America. We were able to significantly increase our presence in new markets such as the UK, South Korea, USA and Canada. And finally, we managed to succesfully approach completely new markets such as Turkey, Eastern Europe, India and China, where several new OEM agreements were signed with local machine manufacturers that now bundle their machines with Lantek’s software.” states Joseba Pagaldai, Commercial Director of Lantek Sheet Metal Solutions. During 2005, Lantek have exhibited their products in 12 different industrial exhibitions in 2005. 2006: Main Targets Lantek’s main target in 2006 from the turnover point of view is to reach 8,5 Million € in sales. “Since our strategy has proved to be successful, we are to continue in the same direction. First, keeping our investment in R&D and therefore increasing our development capacity to deliver state-of-the-art products that not only will provide our customers with the most powerful CAD/CAM system available in the market, but also giving our customers a significant added value in the field of controlling the whole manufacturing environment from quoting through to invoicing, which is what our customers are demanding. And second, consolidating our international presence by enhacing our current teams in the existing 10 branch offices and by increasing our efforts in new markets such as Arab Emirates, South Africa and Malasya. In 2006, our customers will be able to meet us at 12 different exhibitions worldwide.” highlights Pagaldai.