Firstly, my apologies, I am a little late in sending my weekly update.
As you will know, last week all the Field team, including remote staff, met here in the office and I was finally therefore able to meet the last few people I had yet to meet and also join for lunch with the whole Field team. I worked with Michael, K. Jeab and K. Jeep to learn more about many of the challenges that we face; 2014 will be an exciting and challenging year for the field team, with quite a few developments in terms of how we organize our field operations moving forward. The management team and I will update everyone at the beginning of next year as part of the broader company plans for 2014.
Last week I also attended my first client meeting (Sony), with plans to meet all (or at least most) of our biggest clients by the end of the year. Indeed this week I will attend meetings with Samsung and Nikon, and possibly Mitsubishi. Moving forward I will also arrange to meet our most important Retail partners.
We also received many client briefs for customized projects with retailers and an enquiry regarding media tracking last week. The reason I highlight this is to illustrate that, whilst the core of our business, tracking of retail sales, is very healthy and still in growth stage, we have a number of additional opportunities to grow our business moving forward, which we are expected to aim for and which will provide new opportunities for our staff to develop their careers. We are seeking to employ early in 2014 an Ad-Hoc Manager to help drive our customized business within our existing client base; this person will most likely have several years of customized research experience. If anyone knows of anyone who may be interested in applying for this position, please let Khun Chol know.
I also need to share an important development regarding StarTrack access. From today additional security measures are being brought into StarTrack to reduce strongly the number of people with access to confidential retailer data. Please understand why we are doing this. We have a confidentiality clause with retailers and need a good process to be able to show we handle their data with the utmost care, if and when accidentally it ends up in hands it is not supposed to end up in. We have with certain (international) retailers high liability clauses in the contract they sign with us and thus need to ensure the data is only accessed by people who really need it. Only those who service retailers will remain having access to retailer data, we will take it away from most others. We will also take away multi country retailer data access if it is not needed. If you are now unable to access retailer data and you have a very good reason to access to this data, please let me know.
Finally, I had highlighted a couple of weeks ago that we were getting support from our colleague in Vietnam. Hoang Anh is now here and many of you will have already met him. I am sure that everyone will make him feel welcome and offer him support where he needs.
Have a good week ahead,
Craig