Right after Facebook took a big step forward in customer service with the Acquisition of Kustomer for $ 1 billion, another big movement is underway in the world of CRM. Sinchi, a Swedish company providing cloud-based “ omnichannel ” voice, video and messaging services to help businesses communicate with their customers, Ad that SoftBank is taking a $ 690 million stake in the company. Sinch said he plans to use the proceeds from the sale of shares for his own mergers and acquisitions.
“We clearly see how our cloud-based platform is helping businesses leverage mobile technology to reinvent the experience for their customers,” Oscar Werner, CEO of Sinch, told Heaven32. “While people around the world have embraced mobile messaging to interact with friends and family, most businesses have yet to seize this opportunity. We are establishing Sinch as a leader in a global growth market that is still very fragmented, and we are delighted that SoftBank is now helping us realize this vision.
Specifically, Sinch issued and sold 3,187,736 shares worth SEK 3.3 billion, and major shareholders sold an additional 5,200,000 shares, with SoftBank being the sole buyer.
The move underscores the growing opportunity that players in the CRM world, which include not only Sinch and Kustomer, but Salesforce and many others, see their services double at this time. With people working and doing everything else remotely, and with the general upheaval we have experienced in the global economy due to Covid-19, there has been increased demand and strain on digital channels as people use to communicate with businesses. organizations when you have questions or problems.
The problem is, customer relationships have grown to over 1-800 numbers and wait for hours at a time – including social media, emails, interactive chat rooms, chatbots, messaging apps, etc. phone calls.
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Organizations like Sinch and Kustomer, who are building platforms to help businesses manage all these fragmented options in what are known as omnichannel offerings, have capitalized on the demand and are investing now and are looking for the next step in their growth strategies. .
For Kustomer, this jumped into the arms of Facebook, which in turn saw an opportunity to build a CRM business to complement its other business services. Remember that you have also experimented and worked on your Nextdoor’s latest competitor
promote local businesses; and added a tons of trading tools to your messaging applications too.
It will be interesting to see what Salesforce does next. While the acquisition of Slack provides the company with an obvious channel for workplace communication, remember that Slack is also a very popular tool for interacting with people outside your employee network. It will be worth seeing how and if Salesforce is looking to grow this aspect of the business as well.
For Sinch, his strategy has been to make his own acquisitions, including paying $ 250 million for choose a SAP business unit, Digital Interconect, which has 1,500 corporate clients, primarily in the United States, that use it to run omnichannel CRM. Now the plan will be to do more, as there are still large parts of the market that have yet to update and update their CRM approaches.
Sinch, in particular, is listed on the Swedish Stock Exchange and currently has a market capitalization of 70 billion Swedish kronor ($ 8.2 billion at current rates). It’s profitable and cash-generating, so “there’s no need to raise funds for our ongoing operations,” Thomas Heath, chief strategy officer and director of investor relations at Sinch, told Heaven32.
For SoftBank, this investment marks a new stage in which the company acquires significant stakes in fast growing public or semi-public technology companies in Europe.
In October, he put $ 215 million to Kahoot, the online education platform for students and businesses built around the concept that users themselves create “learning games” that can then be shared with others. Kahoot lists part of his shares publicly on the Norwegian Stock Exchange and, like Sinch, the plan is to use a good chunk of the money for acquisitions.
Not all of SoftBank’s investments in growing European companies have paid off. After investing around $ 1 billion in German payments company Wirecard, the company turned out to be one of the biggest scandals in European fintech history, facing accounting scandals before. collapse into insolvency earlier this year
Sinch, as a profitable and stable company with predictable recurring revenue lines, seems like a safer bet for now. Even if Salesforce, Facebook and others improve their game, as the CEO of Sinch says, there is enough untapped market to play well might be enough to get it right.