Softbank wins PKO BP tender
A WBJ news round-up
In what will be the largest contract of its kind in Polish history, a consortium of Softbank, Accenture and Alnova has won the tender to supply PKO BP bank with an integrated computer system. According to analysts, the cost of implementing the system could reach as much as zł. 500 million (E112 million), and the total cost, including labor and equipment, could reach as high as zł. 2 billion (E 449 million).
Representatives of Softbank, whose principal investor is domestic software developer Prokom, have said that they expect negotiations regarding the details of the tender to begin this week and conclude by the end of August, though they don't rule out the possibility that the two sides could come to an agreement sooner.
The tender is a welcome relief for the financial software integrator, coming after significant losses last year. Softbank did not factor the PKO BP tender into its forecasts for 2003, but Aleksander Lesz, Softbank's president, said that the contract will have a significant positive impact on the company's financial results, and that "net profit will be in the double digits."
Shares of Softbank rose 5 percent on the news of the tender victory.
In a press statement released last week, PKO BP said that, should negotiations with the consortium break down, negotiators would turn to the remaining short-listed candidates, namely Financial Network Services, Uni-Lab Investment, Temenos Europe and IBM Polska.
PKO BP, which is the largest bank in Poland in terms of assets and turnover, created the short list of candidates in March of this year from an initial pool of 19 bidders.
IT tenders have been few and far between this year, with companies scrambling to win whatever contracts happen to be announced. One recent example is the bidding war between the country's two largest systems integrators, Prokom and ComputerLand, for the delivery of 10,000 personal computers - a contract which, until not long ago, would not have been considered worthy of companies of that magnitude.
