Apadmi’s recent acquisition of The Mobile Company in The Netherlands marks a watershed moment for the business as a clear first step towards its ambition of becoming the international digital product company of choice.
Here Apadmi’s CEO Garry Partington, Head of Mergers and Acquisitions Jasper van de Luijtgaarden and CEO of The Mobile Company Kees van Mourik talk about why the deal makes sense and why they’re excited about what comes next.
Q: What was the motivation for Apadmi and The Mobile Company joining forces?
Garry: Apadmi’s formula of focusing on helping our clients solve difficult business problems with great digital products has helped us to deliver fantastic growth over the last couple of years. We know there’s a lot of opportunity to make that work in other markets and we’ve been looking at partners to work with outside the UK. The Mobile Company is already doing that in The Netherlands and it felt like a perfect fit right from the start.
Q: What does this mean for The Mobile Company?
Kees: For us this is really an opportunity to accelerate growth. It cements our position as the leading mobile experts in the Netherlands and enhances the expertise we can offer to new and existing clients.
It also enables our teams to continue to learn and grow. To find a like-minded group of people with ambitions, expertise and a cultural approach the same as ours is very exciting.
Q: Why now?
Jasper: The timing was really about using the momentum from our recent growth to kick start our plan of 5, 5, 1500, which has us aiming to be in 5 countries over the next 5 years with a team of 1500.
Q: That’s an ambitious target during what could be challenging economic times?
Jasper: We’re not expecting it to be easy but we believe in the goals we’ve set ourselves. The opportunity comes from the focus on our core expertise.
Many businesses have an agency of choice capable of delivering a range of services such as creative, media, content management, platform expertise. And that model works well, up to a point.
But there comes a time when a digital product reaches its third or fourth cycle and generalist agencies can begin to run out of technical steam. To create great applications which function and evolve as business-critical products requires a specialist supplier, which is where we come in.
Q: What’s different about Apadmi?
Garry: A lot of our clients say that one of the things they really value from us is the honest approach we take when it comes to making technical recommendations. We’re not afraid to say no when we need to and that comes from knowing the technology inside out.
Jasper: And if you put that technical knowledge alongside our Performance team’s capability to better understand and interpret data while optimising and iterating, and deliver that at a European level, it becomes a very compelling offer.
You also have to remember the value for clients in working with a partner which has the scale to be able to access the level of expertise to deliver big projects, while still being at a size when you have access to founders and the most senior people in the business.
Q: What do you think is going to have the biggest impact in the short term?
Kees: The fact that we have more strength in depth with a combined team of more than 250 developers, designers and digital product experts means we can offer more expertise and services to our clients and prospects in the Dutch market, while also providing a firm foothold for Apadmi in Amsterdam.
Garry: You also have to remember this is just the first step. We also have our Apadmi hubs in Edinburgh and Lisbon and we’re already looking at further moves into other markets for next year, which is really exciting.
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