El Segundo, California-based Computer Sciences Corp may only be relatively small in Europe at the moment, but its ambitious plans for growth in the region centre around acquisitions that are culturally similar. The professional services group generated turnover of approximately UKP60m in Europe during fiscal 1993, but aims to hit the UKP200m mark by 1998. Last year, Computer Sciences declared that it had a war-chest for acquistions of $500m, at least half of which will go to Europe. And although managing director of CSC UK operations Richard Dicketts is not quite sure what he is looking for yet – it may be a software or management company, but we may look at areas that we don’t cover at the moment – he says the firm will start digging around at the end of this financial year. CSC Europe is split into three divisions that work quite separately: Service Management, which undertakes facilities management across Europe, although its headquarters are in the UK; market research and management consultancy business, CSC Index; and CSC UK Operations, which provides professional services, systems integration and project management – turnover here rose to UKP37m in 1993 from UKP33m in 1992. Despite the apparent independence of the three, Dicketts did say that CSC Europe’s service management arm wouldn’t have been shortlisted for either the Inland Revenue or British Aerospace Plc facilities management contracts if it wasn’t for the systems integration skills available from his division. It was also helped by the backing of the US parent, which while taking a hands-off approach to management, does have more experience of big contracts and offers the subsidiary access to a large pool of expertise. CSC UK Operations now generates about 16% of group turnover from the government sector, although Dicketts did say it won no new customers here last year. A further 36% of the total came from defence – the RAF LITS contract to design and implement an engineering and logistics system comprised about half of this. Utilities made up another 26% with customers including British Gas Plc, Cellnet Mobile Communications Ltd and the regional electricity boards. And the rest was split fairly evenly between financial services and industrial and commercial activities, primarily manufacturing and petrochemical companies. CSC Europe is also in France, Germany, and Belgium.
