Barco to increase customer satisfaction and organizational efficiency by streamlining its European sales & service organization.

This operation, which has been presented to the European works council and to local employee representatives, will affect some fifty people, a number of whom will have the opportunity to move into other positions to strengthen divisional sales and service teams. A provision for the costs of this streamlining exercise, which are estimated between euro 1.5 and 2 million will be taken in the results of 4Q05. It is clear, however, that the reduction in overhead costs and the increased efficiency of the organisation of Sales & Service following this exercise, will adequately make up for the initial cost.

Redesigning Barco’s European Sales & Service organisation in this way will not only see the central divisional support teams expanded. At the same time it will increase customer focus and thus customer satisfaction in Barco’s European markets by allowing local sales people and service engineers to fully concentrate on their customers. They will indeed no longer have the direct responsibility for logistical support.

As Barco’s offering to her customers has been shifting more and more from products to solutions and projects, a deeper know how is required. The concentration of support functions like sales support, service and project management and a 24/7 helpdesk is the answer and will result in a direct communication line between customers and experts. This, together with central handling of spares, fast on-site repair besides a central repair workshop with faster turn-around times and first hand information on e.g. order delivery times, will improve customer satisfaction.

Greater efficiency will be reached by having dedicated sales and customer support teams and one logistics organisation instead of several in each of the subsidiaries. By concentrating inventories of products and spare parts at the divisional sites, overall inventory cost will be reduced.

This re-orientation towards greater customer satisfaction and higher efficiency of the Sales & Service organisation in Europe, with the repositioning of several functions from the subsidiaries to the divisions, will involve a careful analysis of the possibilities of the available people in the various local organisations to take up positions in the newly aligned organisation. The cost attached to this particular HR-exercise will, however, be adequately offset by savings in overhead cost and higher quality of the services rendered to Barco’s customers.



About Barco
Barco, an international company headquartered in Kortrijk, Belgium, provides visualization and display solutions for professional markets. Barco designs and develops solutions for large screen visualization, display solutions for life-critical applications, and systems for visual inspection. Barco is active worldwide and has its own facilities for Sales & Marketing, Customer Support, R&D and Manufacturing in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. Barco is quoted on Euronext Brussels and is a BEL 20 and a Next 150 company (Euronext: BAR; Reuters: BARBt.BR; Bloomberg: BAR BB).

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For more information, please contact

JP Tanghe
Senior Advisor to the CEO
Barco nv

Telephone +32 56/26 23 22
jp.tanghe@barco.com