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Sanderson Group, who has been mooting the idea of acquisitions for some time now, has started to act with the all-cash purchase of Rugby-based ecommerce software provider Catan Marketing for a maximum consideration of £644.7k. It is a small but neat move because Catan, whose software is traded under the Priam name, is a player in the multi-channel retail space (30+ customers) which along with manufacturing is Sanderson’s area of focus.
Sanderson appears to have secured rapidly declining Catan at a rock bottom price. For the year to 31 August 2012, Catan delivered PBT of £27k (vs. £69k in 2011) on revenue of £895k (£1.2m in 2011). It had net assets of c£50k at the time of acquisition. The acquisition is small enough in cost and company size to slot into the Sanderson operation with minimal disruption and will not detract from the on-going goal of increasing organic growth. As for Sanderson’s current performance, H2 trading is currently in line with market forecasts and better still there are “some early signs of improving general economic conditions.” This follows a H1 that was tougher than it appeared from the reported results (see here).
Ecommerce is one of the growth areas in enterprise software and is attracting attention as a result – from SAP’s acquisition of Hybris (see here), to the ecommerce task force created as part of the UK government Information Economy strategy (see here), and Sanderson’s existing ecommerce business has also been growing well. This will be first of several acquisitions for the multi-channel retail part of the business but you can bet subsequent ones will be just as niche and considered.
