RIB Group grows revenues 24% in 2020

Germany’s RIB Group grew its revenues 24% to €254.6 million in 2020, despite a slowdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a reduction in its M&A activities. International expansion means over a quarter of revenue now derives from north America.

RIB software logoStuttgart, Germany-based RIB Group has announced its results for the year ending 31 December 2020. During the year, the group−since July 2020 part of French multinational Schneider Electric (post)−grew its revenues 24% to €254.6 million (c. £217m or US$301m) from 2019’s €214.6m (post) and its operating EBITDA grew 27.5% to €65.3m (c. £56m or US$77m).

Understandably, the 2020 revenue performance is towards the lower end of guidance issued in August 2020 (“between €240 million and €270 million”), with the Group talking of “severe economic implications caused by the COVID-19 pandemic”. First half results in 2020 had seen RIB revenues up 42% but a further six months of pandemic operation clearly slowed the trajectory. However, the business anticipates “organic growth in the Software business in the double-digit range” for the current financial year. RIB is structured into two main segments: software business iMTWO, and a much smaller procurement and e-commerce business, xYTWO, part of which it had been looking to sell. Overall, for 2021, it forecasts “revenues in the range of EUR 280 to 310 million and operating EBITDA of between EUR 65 and 75 million for the RIB Group.”

Global expansion

RIB regional revenues, 2020Revenues are increasingly global. Until 2016, the company drew more than half its revenues from the German market. Today, this delivers over a third (34.4%) of group revenues. Just over a fifth of 2020 revenues comes from the rest of Europe (22.8% – down from 30.5% in 2019), with revenues from north America up from 19.1% in 2019 to 26% in 2020, while APAC revenues remained relatively static.

The north American growth may reflect the company’s 2019 investment in US acquisitions: During a busy 2019, RIB acquired 60% of the Atlanta-based building specification software vendor, BSD (June 2019). The pandemic slowed its merger and acquisition activities in 2020. In January 2020, it acquired Intech, a cloud and managed services provider for Microsoft Azure in Puerto Rico to expand its customer base across USA and Latin America, and also bought BSD founder Arol Wolford’s startup VIM AEC (post). In June 2020, it bought a controlling stake in a Chinese technology developer, Bochaosoft, and in September 2020 it bought the remaining 40% of BSD. The Group now says it has over €350m in investment funds to finance its further global expansion.

In August 2020, RIB sold its xTWO e-commerce business area (primarily used in the business-to-consumer, B2C, arena for the online organisation of procurement and delivery of building products) to a Leipzig-based firm in which RIB CEO Tom Wolf has a majority stake.

RIB Group partnership with SoftwareONE

In November 2020, RIB Group and Switzerland’s SoftwareONE signed a strategic partnership agreement, aiming to accelerate the market introduction of RIB’s MTWO platform globally. It has set of target of 150 large deals in 20 countries by the end of 2021.

RIB has announced several major deals in the first quarter of 2021. Most have been focused on RIB’s German heartland, but there have also been some wins elsewhere. For example, in January, RIB said one of the consortia working on the UK’s High Speed 2 (HS2) rail network would be using its 5D BIM Big Data technology. It also did a January deal with Spain’s Avintia group. In March it announced deals with US-based precast concrete specialist Fabcon, and with a Hong-Kong-based property developer.

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