'A day Exclusive will never forget' - CEO Jesper Trolle on IPO, reinvesting in the business and attracting new investors

Exclusive Networks CEO speaks to CRN on day of the distributor’s debut on the Euronext Paris exchange

Today, Exclusive Networks made its debut as a public company on the Euronext Paris exchange. The company listed this morning under the ticker symbol EXN with a price of €20 a share, valuing the distributor at €1.8bn.After ringing the bell on Euronext Paris this morning, Exclusive Networks' CEO Jesper Trolle spoke to CRN about where its stock exchange debut ranks among the Paris-based firm's other milestones, and his plans to grow the business over the next few years.

In the grand scheme of Exclusive Networks' history, how big of a milestone is the IPO to you?

It is a natural step, but it's a massive step. Because, really, the reason that we've been able to pull this off is because of all the hard work of all of our employees around the world. Today we celebrate, and we recognise them for all of their achievements. Without what they're doing every day, and what we've been doing for the last 17 years, we wouldn't be here today for this moment.

Today is all about recognising our 2,200 employees around the world.

The IPO raised approximately €366m, which could increase to €421m. How do you plan to use those proceeds to reinvest in the business?

We have a solid strategy in place, we're going to continue to deliver and implement that strategy. Obviously, we will be patient; we will put some of this new sum of money to work and just continue to drive our strategy. This is an opportunity to double down in areas and really accelerate our business and our performance.

For me, this is all about investing in new geographic expansion and to continue to build out our platform. But more importantly, it's also about investing in our teams, investing in our vendors and our partners and make sure we're always refining and delivering more value to them and more services to them as we plug into what their needs are.

So I'm very excited about this. It's also important for me to say that it's business as usual. Yes, today we are a public company and yesterday we were a private company, but tomorrow is business as usual; we'll continue to execute and continue to create value for the ecosystems we are in.

Will being a publicly listed company change how you approaches risk taking or making big decisions?

Of course, something's changed, right? It's a regulated market so there are things you can't say around predictions and forward looking statements. On the business side, I don't believe that things are going to change a lot. In fact, one of the reasons why we're going through this is because we're the company behind the companies, so this is a way for us to step into the limelight and with that comes a public awareness of how we perform, what we're doing, how we did last quarter and next quarter. This is part of strengthening the relationship with our ecosystem - both partners and vendors. Whereas, as a private company, we don't have the same disclosures that you need to comply with.

What are your plans for the rest of the day? Have you got any big celebrations planned?

It's a big day. Today is a day that Exclusive will never forget. We started this morning with gathering some of our key people and some of the teams that have been involved in pulling off this event.

We rang the bell on the Euronext Paris Stock Exchange, so that was quite exciting. There were lots of pictures, as you can imagine, so we can remember this day forever. And then we have celebrations with the teams, with a couple of other people - the advisors, bankers, lawyers - that have been involved in this project over the last six-plus months. So it's a big day, with a lot of focus and attention and a lot of smiles. Because for all of our employees around the world this is a massive step, quite honestly.

What's next for Exclusive?

We want to continue to build out our geographic coverage and expansion to where we are not present today or where we feel we should be a bit stronger. And then, for me, it's all about adding new skills and capabilities onto our model that the ecosystem can really leverage. So the investments we made around X-OD that we've launched last year to help our channel and our vendors conduct business in a subscription based manner, or as a service. I think about the acquisition we announced earlier this year with Ignition and really doubling down on some of these emerging vendors that require a little bit of a different model.

And then it's what we did at the end of last year with Nuaware. We're seeing areas in the market where there is a need for more skills and capabilities. And if we can help align ourselves to that by finding some of these companies and make them part of our platform and basically multiply their scale, reach and resources, then that's a good thing for the whole channel.

For us, it's important to stay with our roots and really continue to focus on this world of trusted digital infrastructure, cybersecurity, cloud transformation and staying in those swim lanes.

Permira, Olivier Breittmayer and Exclusive's management still hold a vast majority of shares in the business, so I imagine not a huge amount changes for a management perspective?

I think that's important for the market. It does signal some kind of stability and shows that we're not completely changing the investor base. We've attracted, quite frankly, a lot of good investors and I'm very happy and appreciative of that. But we have a lot of the ones that have been with us for many years. And that's important for the company and the go-forward strategy.

Were you pleased with the interest you received from investors leading up to the IPO?

I was. There was a lot of interest from European shareholders or investors. We listed in Paris because that's where our home and our roots are, but it's also because we want to list in Europe because it's an opportunity for European investors to become part of this cybersecurity market we operate in. So I'm very pleased with the investor base we have.