On 25 November 2009, in Ludwikowska Room of Polonia Palace Hotel, the ceremonial Gala Everesty 2009 took place. As every year, the Gala was an occasion to summarize the activities both in MCI Management SA and in the portfolio companies. In 2009, we also celebrated the 10th anniversary of MCI.
The Gala was opened by Beata Stelmach, Member of the Board of MCI Management SA, with a presentation summarizing the ten years of activities of MCI.
Next, special guest, Pasquale Diana, Vice-president of the Research Department at Morgan Stanley, responsible for Central Europe region, gave a lecture titled: “Poland: The Jewel in the CEE Crown?”, touching on the current situation in the Region.
The next point on the agenda was the awarding of prizes to MCI portfolio companies, which have managed to resist the crisis. During this yearâs Gala three companies were awarded in the categories: âImproving efficiency,â âDeveloping innovationâ and âSales Growth.â Additionally, the company Bankier.pl was recognized with an honorable mention for âExit of the year.â
The winner in the category âImproving efficiencyâ was ABC Data Sp. z o.o. The award was presented by Konrad Sitnik, Vice-president of MCI, who said: âThe award for ABC Data is an award for the whole employee team, which was able to mobilize in these trying times of crisis to identify key business risks and address them accordingly. ABC Data is an excellent example that a company with 20 years of history is not an organization of inertia.â
The award in the category âDeveloping innovationsâ was given to NaviExpert Sp. z o.o. The statuette was presented by MaĹgorzata Walczak, Venture Partner MCI: âThe award in the category âDeveloping innovationâ for NaviExpert is fully deserved, because we are talking about a company offering innovative navigation for mobile phones. NaviExpertâs navigation stands out for two key reasons, community traffic online and free search. The community traffic online allows calculating the route in real time, which enables to avoid traffic, and thus significantly reduces the time taken to reach the destination. While free search is a unique context-based search engine allowing to quickly locate points of interest. It is worthwhile to mention that this innovative solution is not available in other navigation systems, not even in Google.â â said MaĹgorzata Walczak, Venture Partner MCI, when she presented the award.
In the category âImproving efficiencyâ the winner was One-2-One Group. The award was presented by Sylwester Janik, Venture Partner of the Board of MCI: âin 2009, the One-2-One Group showed that creative diversification of their offer and creating new areas of revenues for its Clients may be an excellent strategy against the crisis. As a result the companies of the Group have taken advantage of the huge growth potential in the sector of mobile value-added services and interactive communications on the Polish market, while strengthening cooperation with key accounts of the company, like EuroZet and TVP. The dynamics of sales O2O in the last 11 months was exceptionally high, and the Board of the Company forecasts its consolidated revenues from sale in 2009 at the level 55 mil. PLN (an increase of 59% on 2008), EBITDA of 1 mil. PLN (increase of over 154%) and at the same time assumes positive financial result on continued operations.â
The chapter also decided to recognize with an honorable mention the Board of Bankier.pl for building value of the company which turned into a successful exit of MCI from Bankier in July this year. The statuette was presented by Hubert Janiszewski, President of the Supervisory Board of MCI.
The evening was concluded with the lecture of another special guest, Cedric Maloux, CEO of Geewa s.r.o., who spoke about building the leaders of tomorrow.