Strong Investment in CX Sees Sabio Group Drive Record Growth

Sabio Group, the digital customer experience (CX) transformation specialist backed by Horizon Capital has announced strong financial and operational performances in its annual report and accounts, published today.

In the year to Sept 30^th 2021, the Group’s turnover increased by 52.8% to £152.5m (2020: £99.8m) while gross profit jumped 43% to £54.5m.

The Group’s annuity services revenue – linked to its managed services, support, technology services and its own IP – also saw a healthy increase of 41% to £96.3m (2020: £68.5m).

Market momentum to consume capabilities ‘as-a-service’, an increase in strategic transformation engagements and revenues from the acquired Anana, Fonetic and makepositive businesses led to Sabio’s professional services revenue more than doubling in the year – rising to £36.5m (2020: £17m)

As a result, EBITDA – earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation – increased by 35% to £22m.

Nils Steinmeyer, Sabio Group’s Chief Financial Officer, said: “Despite a challenging trading environment, I am both proud and delighted to announce that Sabio Group excelled in its performance against our key financial KPIs.

“Our strong growth in turnover was a culmination of the positive organic growth of the business and from our inorganic growth strategy via acquisitions, which we continued.

“Organically, the Group’s professional services revenue also grew steadily as customers engaged on longer-term projects, with strategic clients in particular engaging more frequently in long-term, agile deployment projects.”

Nils added: “The Group intends to continue to invest heavily in the business, marketing our message out to the world and deploying better technology internally to empower our people. Our strategy of managing multiple complementary technologies for our customers wrapped in our own Intellectual Property (IP) has demonstrated clear differentiation in the market and helped to drive our continued growth.”

Operationally, Sabio successfully navigated challenges associated with the pandemic to build on the momentum of its 650-plus customer base continuing to evolve their remote working and digital transformation CX strategies.

That momentum was enhanced by the purchases of the ‘makepositive’ and Fonetic businesses, which saw Sabio continue with its strategy of adding complementary expertise, technology and IP required for both geographical growth and further market penetration. At FY21 year end, 76% of the Group’s top 50 customers use Sabio products to monitor, optimise and deliver CX.

Jonathan Gale, Chief Executive Officer at Sabio, said: “Despite the challenges associated with the pandemic, the Group’s position and propositions within the market strengthened during the year as our customers, and enterprises in general, continued their evolution further to more remote working and digital transformation projects.

“As a result, customer experience strategies grew exponentially in importance and developed to meet the changing needs of customers whose preferences for engagement changed significantly over the period characterised by a significant switch to digital channels with increased support from AI.”

Throughout the year, the Group successfully strengthened its partner network, nurturing relations with the likes of Twilio, Google Cloud, Amazon Connect and Salesforce, while re-enforcing its partnerships with established vendors such as Verint, Avaya and Genesys.

In alignment, it continued its own leadership evolution, appointing both Matt Tuson as Chief Commercial Officer and Nils Steinmeyer as Chief Financial Officer during the reporting period.

Jonathan added: “We established our position in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) space through the acquisition of makepositive and further strengthened our capability around Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Automation, in particular our Bots-as-a-Service offering, via the acquisition of Fonetic. The acquisitions complement the Group’s existing portfolio, providing new and improved capability and strengthening its standing within the contact centre, customer experience, AI & automation and customer relationship management spaces. 

“This now positions Sabio as one of only a handful of companies that possess such levels of expertise, and we believe we are now the largest that is focused on delivering globally for European headquartered companies.”

Sabio also officially launched its new brand and website in the reporting period ensuring greater clarity around the product and service offerings and a compelling visual identity that marked the significant and continued development of the business.