Econocom - 2019 Universal registration document

05 management report

group's financial position and highlights

Financing 1.3. transactions SHARE BUYBACKS 1.3.1. Econocom also continued to buy back its own shares in 2019. It acquired 10,209,425 ژ treasury shares. After taking into account disposals and transfers of shares to managers with share-ownership plans, as at 31 ژ December 2019 the Group held 23,458,144 ژ shares or 9.56% of the Company's capital. These transactions reflect the Group's commitment to limiting dilution for its shareholders and its confidence in its growth outlook going forward. Research 1.4. In 2019, R&D efforts were continued, consistent with the areas developed in prior years with the aim of providing intensive support and assistance for any innovative solutions produced by our customers. R&D efforts focused particularly on the areas of data visualisation (DATAVIZ), decision support, developing integrated solutions in the area of IoT, image recognition in real time, 5G microservice billing and machine learning, applied to process automation.

CHANGES IN OWNERSHIP 1.1.2. INTEREST Synertrade: the Group through its subsidiary Digital Dimension, acquired the minority stake (10%) in July ژ 2019, thus raising its stake to 100%. Gigigo: Econocom group SE acquired all the non-controlling interests (30%) in July ژ 2019. Infeeny: during the first half, Econocom group SE acquired 9.66% of the company's capital. JTRS: Econocom group increased its stake in the company through the acquisition of shares from a minority shareholder (5%). JTRS remains consolidated under the equity method. Altabox: at end-2019 the Group exercised part of its options on 15% of the company's capital, raising its interest to 85%. Alterway: the Group acquired the equity interest of a minority shareholder, increasing the percentage of its ownership interest from 3.01% to 64.45%. Principal investments 1.2. In addition of the equity interests acquired as described above, the main investments made by the Group in 2019 in order to consolidate and transform its operations were related to creating new offers and recruiting for key positions and renewing teams.

110

2019 annual report