Eckoh buys Klick2Contact for £2.35m

Secure payment provider Eckoh bought Klick2Contact (K2C), an Omni-channel customer engagement service, for £2.35m in cash and shares.

The initial £2.53m consideration consisted of £2m in cash and £350,000 in ordinary shares, which included a potential deferred consideration of up to £5.65m in the next two years, subject to the company meeting certain targets for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, amortisation (EBITDA).

Thus, the full value of the sale might total about £8m.

No deferred consideration would be paid unless a minimum of £1m of EBITDA was generated in the 24 months following completion of the sale.

For the 12 months ended 31 December 2015, K2C had unaudited revenues of £881,000 and EBITDA of £219,000. At 31 May 2015, net assets stood at £768,000.

The company expected the transaction to be immediately earnings enhancing.

The AIM listed company said an application would be made to the London Stock Exchange for 678,733 new ordinary shares to be admitted to AIM and trading was expected to start around 27 July. Eckoh would then have 239,405,900 ordinary shares in issue each carrying one vote.

K2C’s products of live help and customer engagement services consist of web chat, instant call-back, knowledge base, social media monitoring and engagement, full workflow and email management, of which are offered in real time. K2C's solutions are cloud-based similar to Eckoh's existing products.

Eckoh chief executive Nik Philpot said: "We have a focused acquisition strategy, looking to find proven, profitable and growing businesses which bring us complementary technologies or reach. The acquisition of Klick2Connect is absolutely in line with these criteria and we are extremely pleased to be adding its excellent product set, expertise and clients to Eckoh's portfolio.

“There is growing demand for a truly Omni-channel customer contact offering, ideally delivered by a single supplier, and by combining K2C into Eckoh's proposition we are well placed to help satisfy this demand. We are excited about the opportunities to cross-sell the K2C products into our existing clients and to use the combined offering to assist us in identifying and securing new clients."

K2C chief executive Graham Pollard said: "We are thrilled to be joining forces with Eckoh and to be able to provide a truly Omni-channel offering for customer engagement.

“Having worked with the Eckoh team over the past few months, it is clear that their market-leading customer contact and secure payment solutions together with our cutting-edge live help and customer engagement services creates a winning combination, enabling us to take advantage of the growing demand in this area."

K2C’s clients are based in 15 countries and include Next, BMW, Topshop, Studio Moderna, Volkswagen, Delimano, Hayes Garden World and UK Mail. Its partners include Capita and Teleperformance.

Shares in Eckoh were down 0.12% to 51.94p at 1018 BST.