Last month, I’ve been delighted to meet for the first time the french Executive Manager of Synertrade, Patrick Chabannes, following online exchanges we had about Synertrade’s lack of communication some times ago. We got an extensive and pleasant conversation sharing our views on the eSourcing market, its maturity, its contradictions, and of course about Synertrade latest developments.
Not surprisingly, Synertrade has been pretty quiet lately – as I did mentioned formerly – as the company was in a challenging and uncertain restructuring process, struggling for life: turning-around its business consulting model to a pure SaaS model, shifting staff skills accordingly, cutting-down drastically resources and all unnecessary costs to stop loss-making and reach profitability as fast as possible.
Good news and kudos to the whole team: they made it, and made it right to secure their current and future customer base. Although the revenue stayed stable at 6M€-ish for the last 2 years – as far as I understood – I leave in your hands to judge the results by yourself:
- 40% increase in software sales (shift of revenue from consulting to software sales),
- 20 new customers in 2007, and major ones like Peugeot-Citroën, Yves Rocher, SFR, Alstom Transport,
- A robust sourcing platform called ST6 available in 13 languages,
- A partner network including UNILOG Management, K-BUY, State of Flux, and Vertigo Consulting
You can read it all in Synertrade’s latest press-release dated from Feb 08 here.
Patrick Chabannes shown the enthusiasm and the confidence you can expect from a passionate entrepreneur who did his job whatever tough it was and who is now looking ahead, reaping the benefits and energy of decisions he made. Actually, he can be satisfied: Synertrade belongs to the ‘last square’ of profitable and independent eSourcing pioneers and can now look forward innovation and growth.
The true adventure is just starting and many new questions are arising: How will the business evolve for Synertrade? Will they keep their independence? What benefit will they gain from their China office? What strategy will they choose to expand and compete effectively?
I just wanted to inform you and your audience that the new blog from SynerTrade is now available:
http://www.synerblog.com
SynerTrade news, documents,events, press releases are available on this blog.
Sébastien Dumas