Member Article

Utilitywise acquire Czech call centre operator

South Shields-headquartered Utilitywise have acquired a multilingual call centre operator based in the Czech Republic.

ICON Communication Centres employs 150 people and in the last year reported revenue of £3 million and EBITDA of £0.13 million.

The deal is worth an initial cash consideration of €1.08 million and a further €1.2 million to be paid by April 2015, subject to Prague-based ICON meeting certain performance targets.

Geoff Thompson, chief executive of Utilitywise, commented: “Our initial testing of the European market is showing early positive results and the addition of ICON to the Group provides us with a European footprint from which to expand our services in Europe to the full intermediary procurement model that we employ in the UK.

“While the opportunity in the UK remains large and our primary focus, we are encouraged with the positive reception to our offering in the European energy markets and look forward to pursuing this opportunity.”

The call centre operation will be used to cater for two large contracts that Utilitywise are carrying out in partnership with oil and gas giant, TOTAL’s TGP division.

One of these contracts will mean Utilitywise offers its German business clients TGP products and the other will see an expansion of Utilitywise’s selling of TGP products to the French market - creating another 20 jobs at the new Prague base.

TGP senior vice president Jon Shead said: “These proposed new co-operations between TGP and Utilitywise re-affirms our confidence in the ability of Utilitywise.

“We believe in their ability to deliver the types of telephone based services that we need to support our continued growth and delivery of strong customer services. We have worked with Utilitywise over a number of years and we appreciate the strength of their business model and the performance focus of their management.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .