Quadient has unveiled the second phase of its ‘Back to Growth’ strategic plan, setting new profitable and sustainable growth ambitions for the next three years and revealing strong growth in the parcel locker solution sector.
Implemented early 2019, the ‘Back to Growth’ strategic plan involved a strong refocus of Quadient’s solutions portfolio, with automated parcel locker solutions, customer communication and experience management, business process and document workflow automation selected as the company’s growth engines. In two years, combining organic growth initiatives and targeted acquisitions, the software and parcel locker solutions went up from 18% of total revenue in 2018 to 27% in 2020.
“The thorough execution of the first phase of our Back to Growth strategic plan has laid strong foundations, putting Quadient in a position to deliver sustainable value for its shareholders and all stakeholders over the next three years and beyond,” said Geoffrey Godet, chief executive officer of Quadient. “We have deeply changed our operating model, simplified our organization and reshaped our portfolio, and have completed acquisitions in the business areas that we had targeted. In the meantime, we have successfully developed our software and parcel locker activities, constrained the decline of our mail-related business, increased the proportion of subscription-related revenue and generated significant synergies.
“As we are entering the second phase of Back to Growth, we are confident in our capacity to leverage our leading positions to reap the benefits of further digitization of the economy and an increasingly high volume of parcel deliveries while maintaining our highly cash-generative mail business. Our new profitable growth trajectory is primarily based on organic initiatives, ranging from investments delivering high returns, the deployment of our end-to-end SaaS/cloud intelligent communication automation software portfolio and the generation of further synergies. In the meantime, we will continue to assess the effectiveness of our invested capital and will deploy our excess cash to additional potential organic initiatives, bolt-on M&A [merger and acquisition]opportunities and/or share buybacks within the limit of our deleveraging targets.”
In line with these strategic directions, Quadient has been actively reshaping its portfolio, reinforcing its positions in selected markets through organic developments and bolt-on acquisitions while undergoing some divestments. Early 2019, Quadient acquired Parcel Pending, a leading US player in parcel lockers, and has been scaling this business, successfully expanding into the US retail market and now exporting its franchise in the residential property market in new geographies such as the UK and France.
Quadient has also acquired YayPay and Beanworks, two leading North American fintech companies, and has divested its data quality business (Satori Software and Human Inference, both in 2019), significantly reduced its shipping software activities (disposal of ProShip and shutdown of Temando, both in 2020) and recently sold its graphics activities in Australia and New Zealand.
Quadient’s financial performance was slowed down in 2020 in the context of the Covid pandemic but it recorded a sharp rebound in the second part of the year, boding well for organic growth to resume in 2021, combining solid growth in software and parcel lockers solutions together with a contained decline in mail-related solutions.
Read more about Quadient’s strategic plan here.
