In business, a nice success story is almost always backed by good values and corporate culture. This is the case of Softwarepipeline, a small Swiss IT security and software licensing company that only 20+ years later turned into a holding group with more than 9,000 employees worldwide and became SoftwareOne. We recently bought shares for our Swiss Value Wikifolio.
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SoftwareOne acts as an intermediary between software vendors and companies and institutions in need of software licensing and support. They also offer different cloud services, including AI. A simple business model that has been working for the past two decades continues to work nicely and there is no obvious reason why it wouldn’t - it’s safe and proven. Employee satisfaction, which they claim to be one of their core values, seems to be correct, as most of their current and former employee reviews online are positive. This helps us believe that the management and PR are credible.
The latest addition to our Wikifolio - according to our research - has a 360° View of 69 at the time of writing of this blog, which makes it a better overall performer than 69% of similar European companies. Its 360° View rank is driven in part by its strong Growth rank at 95 - its revenue growth and stock returns are above average for the industry.
There is a possible drawback when deciding to buy the stock: two recent offers for a takeover by Bain Capital have been declined by SoftwareOne. We are yet to see how it plays out in the future.
Possible Pro and Con points to consider
Strong Obermatt ranks, especially Growth ✔
A safe business model: the company has proven that it can adapt to the fast changing industry ✔
Good corporate culture and values ✔
A possible takeover in the talks ❌
Poor Analysts Opinions Change Rank, which is most possibly due to the merger talks ❌