Well, this is not a story you see every day.
Less than two years after the German software giant SAP snatched the Qualtrics experience management platform for $ 8 billion days before the startup's IPO debut, it has now decided to run the company into a new IPO.
SAP agrees to buy Qualtrics for $8B in cash, just before the survey software company's IPO
In a press release released on Sunday, SAP said Qualtrics saw cloud growth "over 40 percent" in a quote attributed to SAP CEO Christian Klein. The company will continue to be managed by the founder and former CEO Ryan Smith, who joined SAP with Qualtrics and led the organization within the German conglomerate.
SAP will retain the majority of the new spin-out. Interestingly, the statement noted that "Ryan Smith intends to be Qualtrics major individual shareholder. "
SAP's press release is vague, but the implication is that the move will offer Qualtrics more flexibility to interact with customers and partners outside the domain of its parent company.
I'm sure my colleague Alex Equity, Alex Wilhelm, will have much more to analyze tomorrow with his The Exchange column, but SAP's quick approach to the acquisition is a big surprise. While private equity firms will take a private company and sometimes turn it quickly into an IPO, it is rare to see a large company like SAP make such a dramatic offer at the last minute for a company only to reverse that decision a few months later.
Given the market turned on for SaaS markets these days, however, the path seems clear for Qualtrics' return to public markets, particularly if the metrics of the future future independent company have held out since the last time we saw its financial data. . As Wilhelm and his Crunchbase news group wrote during his S-1 presentation:
Unlike most companies that publish this year, Qualtrics is not a fire of losses under the name of growth. Show that you can grow and not lose all the dollars you have at the same time.
"It's not a garbage fire" was a strong point at the time, but Qualtrics was indeed an outclass of his peer group. Assuming these fundamentals have not changed, it looks like a real win for Qualtrics and Smith and a saving of SAP from whatever strategic plan they have decided to change midway.
