Tata Communications to Acquire Kaleyra

Tata Communications has announced a deal to acquire the Communications Platform as a Service provider Kaleyra. Kaleyra has risen from the startup scene in Italy at the end of the dotcom era to a listing on the NYSE four years ago. Tata Communications will be paying $7.25 per share for Kaleyra, which works out to $100M plus the assumption of outstanding debt.

Kaleyra focuses on business communications with customers in the financial services, retail, and digital commerce verticals. Their infrastructure leverages the AWS cloud platform and they manage private clouds for some clients as well. The deal will will boost Tata Communications’ efforts in the enterprise marketplace more broadly, with Kaleyra’s capabilities now able to reach a broader international audience.

Kaleyra had $339.2M in revenue in 2022, which was up 26.7% over 2021. Geographically, 38.9% of that was generated from the US, 20.7% from India, 19.6% from Italy, and 3.8% from South America. They’ve made a few acquisitions in recent years and have run into some troubles, leading to a recent 1 to 3.5 reverse stock split in March of 2023.  The company has been looking at strategic alternatives, and clearly Tata Communications saw an opportunity to gain scale, technology, and talent in the enterprise marketplace.

It’s Tata’s second deal in the past 6 months, having just completed the purchase of The Switch Enterprises, a provider of end-to-end live video production and transmission services.  Clearly the company is looking for inorganic opportunities in the global marketplace, and I wonder what other areas they might be looking at.

 

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Mergers and Acquisitions · Unified Communications