Acquisition Unlock: €210m in 5 Years

Nearly killed us, to be honest, which it was very difficult process. But we pulled it off and we raised the debt, we raised the equity. We closed the day before Christmas Eve, which meant that we closed last year with 210 million in revenue and around about 27 million in EBITDA, about 640 employees now across Ireland, UK and Poland.

So yeah, it was, it was a transformational deal. Now we've said that a couple of times, but this one really was transformational. It puts us in a totally different ballpark.

Which, which of course is the longer term play, the, the real, the real kind of multiplier in your, in your entire play.

Do you do, do the, do your competitors you're referring to even have that or. We. Are they just. These traditional legacy print operators, they will. All claim to have some digital capability and they do.

Right. In fairness, some of them are really good competitors and you know, they compete well against us, but mostly, mostly they will acquire some third party technology and integrate that into their workflow. Whereas we develop all of our own technology, it's a product that we've built up for 10 years, their own platform which could be sold independently to, you know, the service offering that…

So I think there's a distinction between you going, purchasing a piece of software and, and selling that to your customers as a service that you provide and building your own ip, which I think really changes the proposition because what we have is totally unique and nobody else can copy it, whereby a lot of our competitors are all buying the same software and selling the same software to their…

Oh, they're not even, it's not even their own software. It's, it's not even, it's a third party product that they're purchasing. Now I'm generalizing because there are some that are like us, right?

Not so much in the UK and, and Ireland, but there are some businesses out there like us that have their own technology and they're really strong at what they do. But if you look at the industry as a whole, it's not common and it's very difficult to go from being a printer, although there's a lot of technology involved in these businesses, to building a software team and building a platform.

Very difficult mindset shift rather than being a technology company and ultimately buying the print capability, you know. Yeah.

So just to underline where you are today, you are, what you just said, you're, you're pretty differentiated in the market. Yeah. Yes. You've got some couple other guys out there who do something similar, but really it seems like in terms of a digital forward transactional communications business serving the biggest kind of, you know, finance type businesses in the countries, you guys kind of…

You've got that going for you. So for strategic acquirers, maybe you've got real scale, real size now. I mean you are at 22 over north of 200 million in revenue, a solidly middle market business now.