Capgemini has announced the appointment of a new CFO: Aiman Ezzat. The search for a new CFO has been ongoing since October when long-time CFO, Nicolas Dufourcq, revealed that he would be accepting a role as CEO of the future BPI in France (state investment bank). At the time, Capgemini stated that it would make a decision over a new CFO by the end of November. The decision to appoint Ezzat was approved by the Board yesterday.
Dufourcq will be a tough act to follow. He has been Capgemini’s CFO since 2004 (and also served as Deputy CEO). Prior to Capgemini he had held a corporate executive position at Wanadoo and had started his career as Head of Cabinet of Pierre Beregovoy’s government (1992-1993).
Ezzat is an internal hire with a 20 year history within the company. Notably Capgemini highlights the role that Ezzat has played in the development of the Group’s offshore strategy. Following the acquisition of Indo-American IT services company, Kanbay, in 2006, he became leader of the new financial services unit; the unit has 60% of its employees based in India. He also “played an important role” in the development of the Group’s offshore strategy from 2005-2007.
Ezzat is quoted as saying, “I will be devoting all my energy to lead (Capgemini) to a double-digit operating margin”. His devotion to beefing up Capgemini’s offshore ‘leverage’ will also need to be strong if he is to achieve the target operating margin. In H112 Capgemini achieved an adjusted operating margin of 6.4%; in FY11, it stood at 7.4%. Today almost 40% of Capgemini’s 123k-strong workforce is offshore – over 40k in India alone. Last month, Capgemini stated the aim was to grow this to 50% by 2015 (see NA overtakes UK as Capgemini’s largest market).