Press
Hugh Symons restructures and re-organises following sale of cellular and IT divisions
Carphone Warehouse buys Hugh Symons Communications for £10 million; £5 million at completion with a performance-related balance earned out over 2 years
Repairsmart agrees to buy Hugh Symons Computing Solutions (PC assembly division) as a going concern for an undisclosed sum - completion expected at the beginning of January 2006
Poole, December 2005 - In a year of change; Hugh Symons Group continued its re-structure with the sale of its cellular distribution business to Carphone Warehouse (CPW) - on 6th December, 2005. Amid industry speculation, the £100 million turnover award-winning (Airtime Distributor of the Year, 2005 - Mobile magazine) Hugh Symons Communications (HSC) was sold as a going concern with all staff transferred and no redundancies.
Having enjoyed 20% CAGR for the last 3-years HSC was identified by CPW as an acquisition target for its market position and immensely competent staff that fits well with their own business approach and ambitious distribution plans. It is expected that by combining CPW's operational scale, commercial relationships and breadth of product portfolio with HSC's superb reputation for quality customer service and high value connections (Industry leading ARPU) HSC will deliver ambitious growth over the next two years.
With the maturity of the market and the prospect of CPW's entry into distribution, Hugh Symons' board took the decision to sell with a view to directing time and investment resource into their new and growing service-centric businesses. HSC's operations remain onsite at Hugh Symons headquarters in Poole for the foreseeable future and will continue to be run by the existing management team.
In the meantime, Hugh Symons was approached about an exit from its assembly/system builder division. Assembling around 1,000 PCs, servers and laptops a month the business has suffered in the face of intense competition and maturing market conditions to the point that the model was no longer viable in Hugh Symons' cost base. Repairsmart; a service company with a network of engineers and service hubs, was looking to acquire an assembly operation to complement its current operations and grow its complementary services. Their business model is highly cost effective and the contribution from hardware sales delivers both synergistic sales and an acceptable revenue stream with growth potential.
Repairsmart was attracted to the division for its brand, operations and strong supplier relationships with Intel and Microsoft. All staff will be retained and transferred; and the business will operate from Hugh Symons' Poole base. With the Centrex brand transferred the whole Repairsmart Group will be re-branded Centrex as its equity and market-value will add value to the service operations.
These announcements follow the sale of Elata (a business started by Hugh Symons) for $57 million to Qualcom in August 2005, and the closure of their broadline IT distribution at the beginning of the year. Completion of these deals finalises Hugh Symons strategy to divest itself of businesses that require scale operations to be viable so they can focus on emerging technologies with a strong balance sheet. The cash generated from this restructure allows the Group to concentrate on its fledgling local service-centric IT and communications business; its global services company WDS - now employing 1,000 on five continents and projected to double in size within 3 years; and its document scanning and imaging business - now in its 20th year.
An acknowledged expert at developing new markets with new technology; and with the restructuring plans complete in advance of FY06, Hugh Symons is in a very strong position - based on market opportunity and fiscally - to capitalise on the next wave of technology developments.