"Merak increases turnover by more than 10%"

Merak has managed to increase its turnover by more than 10% for the second consecutive year in 2013. The financial year ended with a total turnover of 12.7 million Euros. With this increase, the Belgian specialist in professional archives management is continuing its uninterrupted growth. Recently, the company opened a super-modern new branch in Schelle, where paper and electronic archives are stored under optimum conditions.

The management of their archives is giving many companies a headache. Merak has presented itself as an advanced operator taking on this task and specialising in information management whilst storing millions of paper documents, microfilms, computer hard disks and tapes. In Mechelen, Vilvoorde, Overijse, Merksem, Hombeek and Schelle, data are archived, secured, backed up, checked and double-checked. The company is now broadening its outlook and has opened its first branches abroad, in the Netherlands and in Switzerland.

With an operating income of 786,725 Euros, Merak has done fairly well despite the economic crisis still dragging on. The operating cash flow even increased to 1.2 million Euros. This is remarkable as the company has simultaneously managed to decrease its debt from 6.6 million Euros to only 5.2 million Euros. It has decreased both its long term and short term debt.

The income of the scanning department keeps rising considerably. An increasing number of customers seems to prefer to no longer invest in hardware and software for digital archiving. This means that their employees can now focus on their core tasks. “A while ago we invested in new scanners for Merak-Digital in Schelle, which can each digitise up to 2010 pages per minute”, managing director Henrik Rooms explains. “This has highly increased our capacity. We can now digitise not only invoices and deeds, but also ledgers, building plans, layouts and delivery notes. Because the system is encrypted, it can only be accessed through the correct login procedures. This guarantees the confidentiality of the stored documents.”

Merak has recently also started storing laboratory samples, at temperatures as low as -90°C. Emergency generators and backup systems are at hand to take over in the event of a power disruption or defect.

At the moment, Merak employs some 45 people.