• We have changed suppliers.
• We are in the process of expanding our product range.
• We are busy opening a new branch.
• To keep up with these improvements, our accounts' system has been studied and greatly improved, assisted by two financial consultants.
• We welcomed several new, corporate clients.
• We have improved both of our shops, and expanded both stores.
• In the Moshi office we opened a showroom for office furniture.

We also continued with trends we set in the previous years:

• We have spent time and effort on training our employees in our new products, and made sure all employees fit comfortably in A&A's style and atmosphere.
• Job applicants were scrutinized extensively using improved interviews and skills testing.
• We continued our annual staff reviews. This improved individual staff training, and fine-tuning everybody's role in the company. For these two processes we were assisted by a consultant.
• We had a professional handling of warranty cases. 100% of these were closely followed up and concluded, maintaining customer trust.
• We kept better contact with our customer base through an increased number of newsletters, an improved web site, and an exhibition in Arusha.

Continuing trends

The growth that resulted from these successes has covered easily the only setback we suffered this year: in Arusha, some aggressive competitors opened. Since they provide no or poor service, several migrating customers have already returned to us.

A&A continues on its chosen path of expertise, transparency and honesty, and sticks to its motto "We sell Service!". I am confident that with this way of doing business we will keep our competitive advantage, and will be assured of our big slice of the IT market in Tanzania.

Setback

1. We have to change our image of being expensive. Now that we have changed and added suppliers, we can have more competitive pricing. We will stick though to selling good quality items only, and avoid "grey imports".

2. We are in the process of diversifying our product range so that we can offer complete office solutions. These include office machines, stationeries and office furniture. This means that we have to work hard to gain new product knowledge, and new skills to support clients with these products.

3. Our technical services have improved very much over the past few years: we don't experience backlogs, we have a good system of dispatching technicians to clients, and generating reports and invoices. We still have to improve on our technical services, and aim at zero-returns of repair jobs. We can do that by much more critically testing equipment before releasing it to the client.

4. Opening at other locations. We should soon open in Arusha-West so that we attract clients who do not want to face the traffic jams.

5. Continue offering warranty services - most of our competition don't.

6. Continue making it easy to buy at A&A Computers. We are much faster in making proforma invoices than others, and stock-outs are decreasing. We are good at selling products by email and our web-site.

Alex Righolt,
Managing Director,
December 6^th, 2008.