O2 Centre of Excellence partner targeting mobile and fixed line businesses, with one close to completion
B2B dealer Welcomm Communications is marking its 25th birthday by eying up future acquisitions in the telecoms sector.
The O2 Centre of Excellence partner, which has a base of around 38,000 connections, has acquired five companies in the past four years.
The firm’s chairman Chris Stanton (pictured) told Mobile News it is keen to add to that number, targeting businesses in mobile and fixed line – with one close to being completed.
“We have got our eyes on somebody but I can’t tell you who it is yet,” said Stanton.
“The first will be a mobile company but we are keen to acquire a landline business also, so we’ll be keeping our eyes out to boost our base and sell [Microsoft Office] 365 into it as well.”
Stanton says that aggressive plans to grow their installed base through acquisitions means that its longstanding policy of self-financing deals may change.
He explained: “We’re quite thorough with our due diligence, we don’t use any outside sourcing, everyone we’ve done so far has been fully funded by our own cash reserves.
Branched out
“Going forward that may change because we want to be more aggressive in that area, but I do believe we’ll complete one by the end of this year if not two.”
The firm branched out into unified communications a few years ago and Stanton said that particular field helps to make customers ‘more sticky’.
“The more we can sell into a customer, the stickier that customer becomes,” he says. “A lot of our customers now don’t have one product from us, they’ll have three or four.”
“We’ve still got customers that we had 25 years ago and one of the lowest churn rates in the industry, about 4 per cent, which when you consider he size of our base, is quite considerable really.”
