Fujitsu boss: UK's 2015 elections won't make any difference to us

Exiting the public sector? Not us, sunshine

“Here’s the small print: we are not exiting public sector. We are not exiting our smaller clients. We’re optimising our cost base so that we can free up the funds to work with these top 100 clients.”

So, public sector. No matter what Fujitsu says about boosting its private sector business, it’s still public sector that accounts for the bulk of its business. This despite hostility from the public sector paymasters in recent years, leading to rumours – denied by Tait – that Fujitsu had been whacked on a Cabinet Office blacklist.

“The first thing would be, and you can see this in the economic data thats come out over the last few weeks, we are not in the clear with the health of all the economies in EMEA. There is no doubt about that and I think it’ll be continued pressure on public sector expenditure. So we have to face up to that.”

The “digitalisation agenda” which Fujitsu is pushing is particularly important for public sector, Tait argues to help governments drive down expenditure and better serve clients.

“Now, if you look at two of the biggest economies in Europe, Germany and the UK, clearly we have some very important public sector clients in both areas and we are determined to keep on serving those.”

Do government want to be served by Fujitsu?

The coalition UK government that came to power in 2010 has given the likes of Fujitsu a kicking over the costs of IT services in general, and more specifically the role of small businesses, a process which Tait describes as “destructive.”

“From a UK perspective I think that the Cabinet Office’s initial very public berating of the top suppliers has now subsided a little bit. I think they know they need the big companies like us in their supply chain because we can bring global scale and our balance sheet to some of the very major programs they need to complete.”

“The way to think about it is, when I’m a government department, when is the best time for me to use a small medium enterprise directly? For some of the heavy lifting work I should engage with one of the big companies who are committed to using SMEs in their supply chain.”

“And don’t forget from an SME perspective [the reality of] getting to work with government on an 18 month procurement when you’ve got 50 people in the company with all those Ts and Cs and the damage to your balance sheet and the risk you have to take. I think they’d rather tuck themselves under a responsible major prime [contractor].”

Looking beyond the SME issue, what is Downing St’s attitude to the mega contracts that give backbenchers so many sticks to bear the administration?

“Now what’s going to change in the runup to the election? Not very much. Clearly just before the election we’ll have a period of purdah where no real major decisions are going to get made.”

“But my view is regardless of which administration comes in of whatever form whether it’s a single party of a coalition, the pressure on the suppliers to government will not change. We have to deliver great value to government, we have to take part in this digitalisation agenda and we’ve got to deliver great service at the same time.”