WeDo looking for Asian partner

Following the acquisition of US-based Connectiv Solutions, Portuguese revenue assurance specialist WeDo is now looking for an acquisition target in Asia.

Fernando Videira, the company’s CFO, relayed the intention as the firm announced EBITDA growth of 55 per cent year on year in 2012 to €8.7m. Orders and revenues grew by 20 per cent and 19 per cent respectively year-on-year to €62.5m and €55.1m, with around half of that growth delivered by the US acquisition.

Now with a strong foothold in North America as well as a presence in Western Europe and Latin America, the firm said it has witnessed above average growth in the Middle East and Africa but needs to find a “good, local partner” to boost its presence in the Asia region.

The company, which refers to itself as an ‘enterprise business assurance’ specialist is also seeing significant growth outside of the telco arena, particularly in retail and energy and finance where orders and revenues grew by 91 per cent and 80 per cent respectively. Retail is where WeDo sees the biggest prospects, with the electronics, fashion and food industries expressing particular demand for revenue assurance.

But telecoms is still the big fish and plenty of opportunities are likely to emerge in the future. WeDo believes that around 20 per cent of operators still do not have the tools in place, or believe they need them, for revenue assurance. While another 20 per cent are using proprietary, in-house developed applications.

Yet recently, more than 31 per cent of operator respondents to the Telecoms.com Intelligence Industry Survey 2013 said that their firm was less prepared than they should be to handle significant network and business transitions, such as the move to LTE.

Integration between different systems is a key issue in revenue assurance and fraud management but almost 60 per cent of operator respondents said that a lack of data consistency across different systems was one reason that their organisations do not make the most of their revenue assurance and fraud management functions.

Just less than 50 per cent said that the absence of automated tools to support processes was a problem, 45.3 per cent cited inconsistent procedures and policies across organisations and 41 per cent the lack of accurate and timely information from other areas of the business.

“It is incredible that, in 2013, the lack of data consistency across different systems across systems is still the biggest obstacle to effective RAFM,” said Sergio Silvestre, chief marketing officer at WeDo. “Clearly there is a significant opportunity for specialist companies to help operators to improve their performance in this area. This challenge will only increase in the all-IP, real time and Over-the-Top Services world the Telecom industry is evolving into.”