Tippets by Taps - Issue #121
This week we look at further payments consolidation, a $13b way for Infor to reinvent itself, the surprising way people spend leisure time, hacking Google Maps and more. Enjoy!
Worldline-Ingenico: $8.6 Billion Fintech's Not Quite Cheap Enough - Bloomberg
Payments consolidation continued this week with Worldline’s $8.6bn bit for terminal manufacturer Ingenico. However, unlike Visa’s $5.3bn bid for Plaid, Visa buying a new age technology player with much of the value is in perceived future opportunity, Worldline is buying an old school company with assets that might drive some near term value but who’s future worth is questionable at best.
Ingenico has been a bid target for some time. It is weighed down by a handheld terminals business and has been playing catch-up in online payments…The lower valuation reflects the fact that Worldline is not acquiring a business firing on all cylinders. The deal starts to look more pricey when you consider what the buyer is getting. Based on Ingenico’s expected financial performance for 2020, the starting return on the total 9.5 billion euros all-in cost (including assumed net debt) would be just 4%.
That said, it seems like this has been the plan for a while. Bernard André Joseph Bourigeaud is the Chairman of the Ingenico board. He also just so happens to be the former Chairman and CEO of ATOS which, you guessed it, previously owned Worldline. Given his role in pushing out the former CEO, and the previous foreign private equity interest in Ingenico, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a desire to keep the French company French owned. This wave of consolidation in payments began in earnest a year ago with the formation of what I will forever call Fiserdata, and is showing no signs of slowing down.
Koch Industries acquires Infor in deal pegged at nearly $13B
Infor is a company most people have never heard of. This week, the company that has “17,000 employees and 68,000 customers in more than 100 countries worldwide…[and] generated $3 billion in revenue in 2018” was bought by Koch Industries for close to $13bn.
Infor, which makes large-scale cloud ERP software, has been around since 2002 and counts Koch as both a customer and an investor, so the deal makes sense on that level. Koch was lead investor last year in a $1.5 billion investment, wherein the company indicated that it was a step before going public.
An interesting move by Koch following their massive investment last year. My guess is the company’s IPO prospects were challenged. The current product suite is largely based on an on-prem model which wasn’t built web-first, let alone mobile first. Given the legacy infrastructure the company has to manage in a world that is migrating to the cloud, staying private will give the company more room to operate in an attempt to transform the business prior to going public.
Libraries vs. movie theaters: More Americans went to the library than the movies in 2019, Gallup poll finds
Here’s a fun fact: In 2019 Americans went to the library almost 2x the number of times they went to the movies. For all the talk about the end of books and reading, transitioning books over to Instagram and the like, it sounds like the library has some staying power. Now, I do wonder about how diverse the survey participant sample set was and, in particular, if they skewed toward “parent of a child under the age of 5”. In the last 16 months since I became a parent the number of times I have gone to the movies is exactly 0. The number of times I have gone to the public library on the other hand: 20+.
How to virtually block a road: Take a walk with 99 phones
File this under brilliant technology hack. For those of you who live on a formerly quiet, safe street that has now been overrun thanks to Waze and Google Maps sending traffic your way, you don’t need mad coding skills to make Google Maps show you bad data.
The little red wagon full of phones is the idea of German artist Simon Weckert, whose projects focus on “hidden layers” in technology and examine the social and moral effects of the modern electronics-based lifestyle.
Google Maps determines congestion by gathering the location and motion speed of phones in a given area. Generally speaking, those phones are going to be in the road because they’re with drivers, inside vehicles, and so measuring the phones’ speed is a reasonably decent proxy for measuring vehicle speed. Those data points, aggregated, make a road look green on the map if traffic seems to be moving smoothly, or they look red on the map if traffic appears to be severe. When traffic is severe, the map’s navigation software will reroute drivers around the congestion when possible.
Shock after alcohol flows from kitchen taps in Kerala
Depending on who you are, the idea of alcohol flowing from your kitchen faucet sounds amazing or awful. Well, for a community in Kerela, India this dream/nightmare was a reality.
The smelly, brown liquid began flowing from kitchen taps in the block of flats, in Kerala, on Monday morning. Bemused residents then contacted the authorities for help, and discovered their water well had been contaminated by officials - albeit accidentally. It emerged 6,000 litres of confiscated alcohol had been buried nearby. The alcohol, which officials had placed in a pit after it was seized on court orders, had seeped through the soil and into a well - the same well which supplied the residents of the 18 flats in Thrissur district with drinking water.
Quote I’m thinking about: “The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.” - Thomas Jefferson