Acquisition of Docia helped increase RIB’s 2014 earnings from its SaaS/cloud operations, and these more than doubled in the first quarter of 2015.
The value of the July 2014 acquisition by RIB Software of Copenhagen, Denmark-based SaaS construction collaboration technology provider Docia (aka Byggeweb) has been confirmed in RIB’s 2014 Annual Report, which, somewhat belatedly, I’ve been reading this week.
As I wrote, the deal was indeed worth around €20m – to be more exact, €20.159m (or then £16m). The total comprised a €7.1m purchase price, an earn-out component based on Byggeweb’s earnings (EBITDA) in the year to December 2014 which resulted in agreement to pay a further €2.749m (adjusted down by €0.25m as part of a share purchase agreement), and a consideration of 880,000 shares worth a further €10.560m.
The acquisition helped increase RIB’s earnings from its SaaS/cloud operations in the year to 31 December 2014 from €6.653m to €9.393m (Docia contributing €2.291m in five months, roughly equivalent to a full-year contribution of €6.699m) with the segment profit up from €4.395m to €5.684m. The RIB report says Docia had 7,000 customers and around 140,000 users and is currently used on 850 projects worldwide, and adding: “In 2015, Docia was integrated with iTWO 5D and developed into a 6D platform, which also supports model-based facility management processes.”
According to RIB’s latest interim report, in the first quarter of 2015, itsSaaS segment more than doubled, generating revenues of €4.794m, up from €2.032m the previous year, underlining the boost that the Docia deal has given.
Projectcentre
While browsing the RIB website I had a look back over previous years’ annual reports to get some understanding of what the Stuttgart-based software group paid for a previous SaaS acquisition, of Australia’s Projectcentre (aka CADX) in October 2012. The 2012 Annual Report said the amount of the purchase consideration had not been settled as it was partly dependent on future economic development of the business, but for the purposes of the report it assumed a fair value of €14.028m (then c £11.2m). A purchase payment of €4.524m and “a payment into RIB CADX as part of a capital increase” of €3.243m were made in October 2012 in respect of 75% of the business. The balance of shares was eventually acquired in July 2014 for shares worth €1.759m, according to the 2014 report.
