This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily on April 20, 2020

KUALA LUMPUR: While the Covid-19 pandemic caught most businesses around the globe off guard, Scicom (MSC) Bhd was able to switch gear easily and get most of its employees to work from home when Malaysia implemented the movement control order (MCO) last month.

Scicom founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Datuk Seri Leo Ariyanayakam said it is business as usual for the technology and business process outsourcing (BPO) company, and there is no impact on its billings. “As we are speaking right now, we are still hiring and training people,” he said.

Leo said Scicom had actually been planning to come out with a work-from-home arrangement since last year, even before the Covid-19 pandemic surfaced, just like how some companies in the US with a workforce as large as 30,000 have done.

“So, when Covid-19 came along, we were in a better position than most companies [and able] to switch to working from home very quickly,” he told The Edge Financial Daily in a phone interview.

Despite working from home, Leo said the key performance indicators for clients were met, and existing businesses and billings were maintained.

He said the company’s focus now is on maintaining its billings and ensure that the business continues without any hiccups, while at the same time ensure growth in order to continue rewarding shareholders.

He said that with decent billings and a rich cash pile, Scicom is well- positioned to accomplish this. Its most recent balance sheet showed that Scicom had zero borrowing, and cash and bank balances of RM29.17 million as at Dec 31, 2019.

Leo said demand in the e-commerce sector had been increasing during the MCO period. 

“As a direct result of the MCO, some of our clients have experienced an increase in traffic, and as a result asked us to increase [their] headcount,” he said.

“People can’t move around, so they are experiencing a much higher throughput and volume. So, we were approached to increase the headcount for a few of our clients to the tune of 150 to 200 due to the MCO,” he said, adding that Scicom’s banking clients had also asked to increase their  headcount.

Together with the contracts secured last year, Leo remains positive that it will do better in the current financial year ending June 30, 2020 (FY20). The jobs are in the BPO division, which consists of three areas: customer lifecycle management, e-government solutions and e-commerce solutions.

For the first half of FY20, Scicom’s net profit grew 11% to RM12.58 million from RM11.34 million a year earlier, while revenue rose 20% to RM93.89 million from RM78.37 million. The higher earnings were attributed to a higher revenue from the BPO business, which principally comprises services provided to clients.

Leo said that with people expected to continue avoiding face-to-face meetings in the next six months or so, the company will be able to leverage on the opportunities available, especially in the e-services businesses.

Noting that lockdowns have been implemented across the globe, he said Scicom is looking forward to securing more clients from Australia, the UK and the US in the next two to three months.

Apart from seeing a higher volume and increase in client traffic in the e-commerce business, Leo said the company had also received enquiries from the government on accelerating e-government initiatives.

Scicom is also getting enquiries for training. “Business will come back as it (impact of Covid-19 on the workforce) will eventually bottom out. The people will start coming into the economy again and it will take some time but who knows [when] ... so, it’s not all doom and gloom,” said Leo.

“We are making sure what we can grab in terms of training, focusing on making sure that we can get new businesses going forward, which are already in the pipeline,” said Leo.

Scicom shares closed at 75 sen last Friday, down 40% year to date.

‘Our people come first’

While Covid-19 may have resulted in a bleak outlook for many, employees of Scicom are in good hands.

“As a good corporate citizen, we make sure that our own people are being taken care first and then we make sure that we take care of their connectivity requirements, as well as them having PCs and laptops,” said Leo.

Although Scicom has the approval for employees to work at the office, the firm’s focus is to keep as many people safe as possible.

“We have spent some money but that is not a big deal as we make sure that they are all able to work from home,” said Leo, adding that the staff of Scicom were rewarded with half a month salary as a bonus.

Of some 800 employees, nearly 94% of Scicom’s workforce are now working from home. Meanwhile, with many businesses venturing into new businesses to combat Covid-19, Scicom is working in its own way via its own in-house Covid-19 contact tracing application.

“The app, Covid19-MY, is built as a CSR (corporate social responsibility) initiative to support existing nationwide efforts to combat Covid-19, and as such our Covid-19 application solutions are also available to companies and governments in other countries free of charge,” said Leo.

“We are working together right now with a large medical group here to get it on the App Store and Google Play,” he said.