Digital River 2002 Annual Report Download - page 5

Strategic initiatives advance innovations
Our corporate goals provide an important foundation for our future growth. In combination, these goals created momentum
for several 2002 key initiatives that will continue to influence our business in 2003.These initiatives include:
One unified organization and technology platform. During the year, we combined the sales and operations teams that
support our E-Business and Software Services Divisions and made continued progress toward one unified technology platform.
These consolidations created important efficiencies that positively impacted our 2002 profitability and will carry over into
the future.
E-Team.We created a cross-functional team of highly skilled professionals to improve our operational performance across
the organization.Through this team’s efforts in customer service, we reduced call-to-order ratios by 30 percent in the second
half of 2002 and improved average answer-times by 50 percent for the full year. In 2003, this team will implement new
efficiency programs and expand its focus to other areas of the company.
Organizational transparency and communication.We continue to build a culture that is open to innovation and dialog with
few structural barriers so the best ideas and practices can prevail.This culture has helped us achieve a level of success that
continues to be recognized by publications such as BusinessWeek,The Washington Post, and Investor’s Business Daily.
Growth drivers for 2003
In 2003, we’ll continue to focus on what we do best – e-commerce outsourcing. As our market opportunity continues to
expand, we intend to intensify our focus on the growth drivers that historically have been instrumental to our success:
E-Marketing for existing clients.We relentlessly track the impact of e-marketing across our client network, and the statistics
demonstrate a compelling difference. In 2002, we managed nearly half a billion promotional e-mails for our clients with
associated revenues growing nearly 41 percent from the prior year. In 2003, we expect to see these numbers grow.
New clients. In 2002, we grew our client base to nearly 34,000 companies, which includes software publishers,
manufacturers, distributors and retailers.We expect to see continued growth in our client base as we move forward.
Acquisitions. In 2002, we acquired certain assets of Beyond.com Corporation’s eStores and CCNow.com, adding thousands
of companies to our client base. Moving forward, we will continue to focus on acquisitions that are accretive to earnings
and open new market opportunities.
3