As Christmas is now literally just around the corner and we would like to take this opportunity to thank you for the great work we did together in 2017. The year 2017 was very successful for PantherMedia. We achieved a growth rate of more than 25% which has brought us back to the levels of growth we experienced during our start-up phase in the period from 2004 to 2008. This was underpinned by a number of initiatives. These included growing revenue from distributors by 50%, as well as new visuals related services in the context of the internet of things (IOT) and new products like video. And we have further innovative initiatives already in the pipeline that we will keep you appraised of as they unfold over the course of the year. However, we intend not to avoid the fact, that there were also some less than satisfactory events in the course of this year. This was in particular the multi-day outage of our overall system in November as well as the multi-week unavailability of our FTP-Upload which might have affected you directly. The latter we regret deeply and are very happy that we can announce here and now that the FTP-Upload is available again and fully operational with immediate effect. The cause, by the way, was a highly complex hardware failure that was not easy to identify. Our current top priority in IT for the next three months is to migrate our entire IT-System into the cloud to AWS. This will ensure seamless scalability and independence from hardware issues. The arrival of Amazon’s already legendary Snowball as a first step is imminent. Even if it won't be quite as dramatic as in the video this forms one of the key elements of our strategy for the future. The central pillar of any future success for PantherMedia, however, remains unchanged and it is you and your images. After the AWS migration we will also be able to accept videos and other formats and content that you may already have waiting. In particular due to our new found strength in international distribution the quality and volume of images is more important than ever for our growth and has direct impact on your personal sales potential. Our goal for the new year is to grow by 25% again and for that, more than anything else, we need more images and soon additional formats like video, too. Please use the re-activated FTP-Upload to upload any available images you may have as quickly as possible. In the course of the year we will be unveiling further initiatives related to image upload volumes. With all this in mind we would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year as well as good luck, health, happiness and success for you in 2018! We look forward to working together successfully in the new year. Your PantherMedia Team | 
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