“Indra will continue to create and maintain jobs in innovation and technology in Spain thanks to its upbeat business development”, declared Fernando Abril-Martorell, chairman of Indra, the keynote speaker at today’s Desayunos Esade talk held by Esade Alumni in conjunction with CriteriaCaixa. The Indra chairman explained that “the company has some 49,000 employees (up some 13% since 2018) and created more than 1,400 net jobs in 2019 in Spain, i.e. more than 3,000 new jobs in the last two years.”

Abril-Martorell highlighted that “Indra creates high-value employment and offers development opportunities in Spain for highly qualified professionals: more than 80% of Indra’s professionals are engineers, graduates or highly qualified technicians and more than 7,000 young professionals have started work at Indra in the last three years.” “Our business makes a very positive contribution to society in terms of qualified employment, stability and future”, he added.

Abril-Martorell links his company’s ability to create employment to its transformation and ability to provide sustained support for its key public- and private-sector customers. He illustrated this with the example of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) programme which “will enable Spain to foster a first-rate, advanced, export industry of defence systems. If we get it right, this will mean quality employment and opportunities for our young engineers, and a boost for business and R&D in Spain”. In this respect he explained that “it was logical to choose Indra as the Spanish industrial coordinator. Choosing any other company would have entailed the risk of relegating Spanish industry to ancillary and manufacturing tasks with lower value added, in other words to being subcontractors – they do make a valuable contribution, but in today’s globalised and digitalised landscape, this would mean Spain lagging behind.”

Business and cultural transformation

Abril-Martorell also gave an overview of Indra’s complete overhaul in recent years. Whilst acknowledging that the company still has a long way to go, he said that “as a result of this overhaul, our company is now more robust and focussed and has excellent growth potential, all whilst sustaining a healthy P&L balance.”

Whilst outlining the key points of Indra’s overhaul, he mentioned “an initial series of high-impact moves designed to turn around and gradually improve the company’s finances, resulting in a return to profits and healthy cash flow in 2016,” in addition to “more dynamic sales giving Indra maximum contracting and portfolio figures”. The transformation of the IT business “has structurally improved the company’s performance, thanks to its range of cutting-edge products and services which is slowly but surely evolving towards the top of the market, with a focus on end-to-end value propositions and products and the implementation of schemes to improve efficiency and optimise operating costs”.

The Indra chairman also said that the moves currently under way to turn the firm’s business around in Latin America, “have resulted in positive EBIT figures for the entire region in 2018 and a good growth outlook,” and finally that, “our sustained R&D efforts set us apart from our competitors, as demonstrated by the fact that Indra is the ICT company making the second highest investment in R&D in Spain.”

Abril-Martorell described the cultural transformation implemented in Indra as crucial. “The creation of an attractive, inspirational workplace for talented professionals is essential for our future and the best way to enable Indra to achieve its goals and aims in the long run in an age of talent and knowledge.” Indra has achieved this by implementing a comprehensive transformation programme consisting of a series of actions “designed to respond to the expectations, wants and needs of these people and position the company as the best platform for enabling employees to achieve their personal and career goals, and be the best place in which to grow, learn, make a real impact and develop themselves fully.” “All in a highly competitive setting as regards talent,” he added.

The Indra chairman also touched upon the importance of digital change for society, the government and companies. In this respect, he mentioned that “Spain has many of the factors necessary for success in the new digital era”, and emphasised that “it must change more quickly in far reaching areas other than technology, such as those related to society, regulations, finance, etc. This calls for powerful leadership with a forward-looking mindset in order to embrace digitalisation as protagonists.”

The Indra chairman was joined during the Desayunos Esade talk by Mario Lara, the director of Esade Madrid and Juan María Hernández Puértolas, head of communication at CriteriaCaixa.