'We've got way bigger ambitions' - Infinigate bosses eye M&A in the UK to reach €1.5bn sales goal
Distributor ‘cannot be satisfied’ with its scale in the UK market, says chief business development officer Julien Antoine
Infinigate is proactively looking for acquisitions in the UK as its senior leadership claims that the cybersecurity distributor "cannot be satisfied" with its current scale in the market.
Last year, the Switzerland-based distributor set itself the goal of reaching €1.5bn in revenues by 2024. At a group level, the cybersecurity VAD was turning over just €18m 16 years ago.
The target was set in the same year that Infinigate changed ownership following investment from Bridgepoint and the departure of H.I.G Capital.
The SonicWall, CyberArk and Barracuda distributor is set to reach €750m for its 2021/2022 financial year ending this coming March, while achieving organic growth of 25 per cent.
Speaking to CRN, former Exclusive Networks exec Julien Antoine, who joined Infinigate last year as chief business development officer, said that the business needs to expand internationally and add more scale in its core markets if it wants to achieve the €1.5bn revenue goal by its 2024 timeline.
He said that the UK in particular is a market where Infinigate is very small in comparison to the size of the market.
"With the size and ambition we have at Infinigate, we can't be satisfied with the size of the business we have in the UK. We've got way bigger ambitions," he said.
"In the UK there's no way we will be reaching €100m or €200m just organically in the next two years, so M&A is at the top of the list but on top of organic growth".
Antoine predicts that around 50 per cent of Infinigate UK's growth with come from acquisitions, with the other 50 per cent coming from organic growth.
It's UK operations are already growing rapidly through organic growth alone. In its last financial year ending March 2021, Infinigate UK grew its revenues by 43 per cent year on year to £32.64m.
In an interview with CRN at the time, UK MD Justin Griffiths said the performance was helped by some structural changes implemented in the business during 2020 including the addition of customer-focused roles to its sales team and the appointment of former CMS Distribution exec Tanith Russell.
Like with previous years, Antoine and Griffiths said they expect most of its growth to come from its SMB and mid-market segment.
The distributor is also eyeing up acquisitions across the rest of the EMEA market. It began the year by acquiring French cybersecurity, storage and infrastructure VAD D2B Informatique and more acquisitions are likely to follow.
"The market is quite hot all over the world in terms of acquisitions. Having experience doing acquisitions outside of EMEA, I think we should first work on EMEA, that's the strategy."
Hitting $1.5bn in revenues is no easy feat. Infinigate will have to add €750m to its top line over the next two or three years to reach the goal. But Antoine said he is confident the target is achievable.
"Everybody's looking at me thinking ‘No, you're not going to make it, you're just crazy. You're just putting a number in the air'. But when you scratch the surface, and you see what the team are doing, what we are achieving, and you see the momentum we have with the vendors, then you see that I'm sleeping well at night with this figure."
Antoine said the added scale will allow Infinigate to capture new opportunities as more customers look to consume cybersecurity in a subscription and cloud-based way.
"Now's the time to build the next generation of value add. Is the value-add provided by distributors in a world where everything is subscription and cloud-based the same as the value-add which was available two, three, five, or 10 years ago when everything was hardware-based?"
"We believe we need to change this paradigm to really bring this value into this new world where we still sell cybersecurity… but the way we do it has to be significantly reshuffled. And that's the journey we're starting at Infinigate."