Proximus Group to be $3 bn biz in 3-4 years, Route Mobile $1 bn: CEO Guillaume Boutin
Belgium-based Proximus Group, which has acquired a majority stake in communication platform as a service, or C-PaaS, firm Route Mobile, intends to double the group’s revenues to $3 billion in 3-4 years, on the back of synergies from the new acquisition, chief executive officer Guillaume Boutin told Mint in an exclusive interaction.
Boutin has kept a goal of attaining 15% margin on the revenue target, even as he pegged India to become among the key contributors to the group’s growth where Route Mobile alone is expected to generate $1 billion in revenues.
“With Route, Telesign and BICS, all together it will represent within three to four years, $3 billion of revenues globally, and at the margin that is going to be the goal of 15%,” he said.
“The ambition for Route is to reach $1 billion within three to four years. It will be supercharged by the synergies by integrating Route within the Proximus family,” he added.
Proximus, a telecom service provider, will also double down on investments in India and raise its headcount in the country by a few hundreds, which will also serve as its research and development hub for developing GenAIbased products.
“The ambition we have is to scale Route Mobile’s R&D capabilities not only to serve the C-PaaS platform but also to help us accelerate the development of Telesign and more traditional Proximus telco activities that we may have in Europe. Significant investments will be needed, in operations, IT, R&D, to achieve that scale,” Boutin added.
The euro 6-billion Proximus Group provides 5G, data and fibre services in Belgium and several other European markets under brands including Proximus, Scarlet and Mobile Vikings.
On Wednesday, Proximus Group completed the acquisition of a majority stake in Mumbai-based Route Mobile, nearly a year after former agreed to buy a 57.56% share stake in the latter for ₹5,924.4 crore, through its subsidiary Proximus Opal.
The deal is one of the largest in the communications services space in recent years.
Route Mobile founder Rajdip Gupta, along with other members, then reinvested over ₹2,760 crore in Proximus Opal through which he now holds about 13% in the entity. Gupta will continue as the managing director and Group CEO of Route Mobile and will also spearhead the C-PaaS business globally.
The agreement to buy the initial stake triggered a mandatory open offer to purchase up to 26% more of the company's outstanding shares. Proximus Opal bought another 24.99% stake through the open offer for ₹2,593.4 crore.
It now holds 82.7% in Route Mobile and has about 12 months, as per Sebi guidelines, to cut its stake down to 75% to ensure the public holding in the company is at least 25%.
“We have about 12 months to come to 75%. We have the open market, or we can create some blocks of shares,” Boutin said in response to a question on ways to meet the Indian regulations.
Gupta told Mint that Route Mobile will be able to cross-sell products of Telesign, which specialise in digital identity and digital anti-fraud products, in India and other markets of Asia, Africa, West Asia where it operates, while Telesign will take Route’s C-PaaS solutions to the US and European markets where it operates.
The company is also looking at more wins from the India market in the application-toperson SMS service space, where it landed a two-year $100 million deal from Vodafone Idea in August last year.
The acquisition by Proximus is one of the largest deals in the communications services space in recent years