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What entrepreneur Daan De Wever has been dreaming of for years has become reality: thanks to two mega takeovers in Sweden, he is building his cloud telecom company into the number 1 in Europe and from now on he will compete between major players such as Microsoft, Cisco and RingCentral.
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De Wever is clearly delighted when we speak to him via Teams. “We worked hard during the corona crisis,” he says with a laugh. ‘The result is here now. We are where I had hoped to be when I said five years ago that we want a turnover of 150 to 200 million euros.’
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To be precise: Destiny makes a quantum leap from 90 to 170 million euros in turnover due to a double blow in Sweden. It takes over Telepo, which provides the underlying technology to seamlessly merge fixed, mobile and internet telephony and where the company from Zaventem has been a customer since 2013. Telepo’s technology is used by two million users, mainly in Norway, Sweden and Finland. ‘If we really wanted to succeed in our ambitions to become a pan-European player, we had to have that technology in-house. We had this takeover in mind seven years ago, but the timing had to be right.’
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During rush hour
In addition, De Wever is buying a ticket to the Scandinavian market – with tentacles as far as the UK and Germany – by taking over the Swedish market leader Soluno. That is, just like Destiny, a provider of telecom as a service in the cloud. ‘It also built a whole series of innovative applications around that and it allows us to grow strongly geographically,’ says De Wever. ‘The Scandinavian countries are at the forefront when it comes to cloud communication. That is also why it is so nice to have a foothold there.’
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‘There is still enough capital to accelerate our acquisition strategy even after these acquisitions.’
Daan De Wever
Founder and CEO of Destiny
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Destiny’s cloud services are an alternative to traditional telephony, with each company having its own telephone exchange. Because the telephony services are managed on a platform in a central data center – the cloud – a number of other services can be linked to it, such as a help desk, voicemail, agenda planning, Slack, web and video conferencing, security…. bridge between telecom and IT. Well-known customers are ZEB, Würth, Katoen Natie, Interparking and Democo, and thanks to the acquisition of Telepo, now also several major European telecom providers such as Tele2, Telia and TMobile. Proximus Business, Telenet Business and a few smaller players form the competition, but in the segment of medium-sized companies, Destiny is the big gulp in the Benelux.
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Destiny
> Founded in 2008 by Daan and Samuel De Wever.
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> Turnover: 90 million euros (2020), 170 million after the acquisition of Telepo and Soluno (2021).
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> Ebitda: 40 million euros (2021).
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> Employees: 635 in six countries (Belgium, Netherlands, France, Sweden, UK and Germany).
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> Customers: Katoen Natie, Standaard Boekhandel, Interparking, ZEB, McDonald’s, Decathlon, Democo, Facq, Schoenen Torfs, Tele2, Telia, TMobile….
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Due to the double takeover, Destiny, which De Wever founded in 2008 with his brother Samuel and was acclaimed as a Promising Company in 2015, is the largest in its sector, followed at a distance by the German Nfon. “We are among the largest globally, after RingCentral, Microsoft, Broadsoft (Cisco) and Vodaphone.” In five years, Destiny has so a growth spurt from 28 million to 170 million euros. The gross operating profit (EBITDA) on this will clock in at 40 million euros.
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Destiny will take full control of the Swedish companies – ‘as always, we want one hundred percent control’, according to De Wever. Telepo was a subsidiary of the Canadian multinational Mitel, which also offers telephony solutions. Soluno was owned by the private equity arm of the Swedish bank SEB. De Wever does not want to say how much Destiny and its French main shareholder Apax will pay for the double deal. ‘There is still enough capital to accelerate our acquisition strategy even after these acquisitions. With Apax’s commitments, we can easily continue to grow for another three to four years.’
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Until this deal, both brothers owned about 30 percent of the capital, compared to about 70 percent with Apax. That ratio remains about the same. ‘We do allow management and executives to become shareholders in the Destiny Group, although that does not always mean that they remain operationally active.’
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‘You run the risk of buying a lot of companies and simply stacking them on top of each other, without properly integrating them. I do have questions about that with some groups.’
Daan De Wever
Founder and CEO of Destiny
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Destiny is one of those Flemish tech companies that are growing rapidly through an intensive buy-and-build strategy, a mix of acquisitions and organic growth (see inset). Just last year Wasn’t De Wever afraid that by growing so quickly due to a rapid takeover policy, he would sooner or later lose his grip on the group? ‘You indeed run the risk of buying a lot of companies and simply stacking them on top of each other, without properly integrating them. I do have questions about that with some groups.’
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‘So you have to keep an eye on your long-term story and how the puzzle fits. That is why it is also important that we grow by more than ten percent per year, also apart from the acquisitions – in other words organically.’
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