Connections Consult a company founded in 2005 and a leader on the Romanian digital transformation market, went public today, September 22, on the AeRO market of the Bucharest Stock Exchange under the ticker CC. The company operates regionally, with offices in Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia. Prior to the listing, Connections Consult carried out a private placement of shares, attracting funds worth RON 10mn from capital market investors for the opening of a subsidiary in the United States of America, investments in its own products and other companies in its field of activity.
‘The listing of Connections Consult strengthens the sector of the IT and software companies on the Bucharest Stock Exchange, being the fourth company in this field to come to the capital market this year. It is also the nineteenth company listed on the stock exchange in 2021. The Connections Consult team and business have grown a lot in 15 years of activity, and we are glad to be able to support and witness the rise of the company on the local and international markets’, said Radu Hanga, President of the Bucharest Stock Exchange.
‘After 15 years of experience in technology and business process streamlining, marked by a constant growth in turnover and profit, we have every reason to be optimistic that, once we enter the stock market, our development plans, in the country and abroad, will be boosted and intensely supported by the newly listed company status. We experience favourable times when businesses and society as a whole are taking accelerated steps towards digital transformation, and we are ready to seize these opportunities. The funding we have attracted from investors is helping us to expand into foreign markets, primarily targeting the North American market, in product development, in the area of specialised robots and the use of technology to promote green energy, as well as in the acquisition of matching companies. We also aim to expand our team of specialists, including at management level, and we hope that the capital market mechanisms, such as the Stock Options Plan, will help us to bring some of the best professionals in the market, both in Romania and in other countries’, says Bogdan Florea, CEO and founder of Connections Consult.
The Connections Consult listing comes after a private placement of shares held in July 2021. The company issued 144,928 new shares with a nominal value of RON 0.10. The shares were sold in the private placement at a price of RON 69/share, the company managing to attract funds worth RON 10mn from the capital market. A total of 184 investors subscribed to the placement, out of which 45 qualified investors (including professionals) and 139 retail investors. TradeVille assisted the private bond placement and listing.
‘With the listing of Connections Consult shares by TradeVille, the AeRO market gains a new issuer with international exposure that we hope to grow more and more. Connections already has businesses moving the company’s products from the USA to India and Vietnam, going through the largest countries of Western Europe as well as the Middle East. We are confident that the Romanian stock market can provide the “fuel” to take Romanian ingenuity around the globe. The success of Connections’ financing is further proof to this’, says Ovidiu-George Dumitrescu, CFA, Deputy CEO of TradeVille.
Connections Consult is part of a group of technology companies specializing in digital business transformation that also includes Connections Technologies and Outsourcing Support Services. The company operates four delivery points in Bucharest (2), Belgrade (1) and Sofia (1), and manages sales representatives in Germany, Saudi Arabia and Serbia. The CC team provides hyper-automation services, custom software development, IT infrastructure operations support and business process outsourcing with technology support. The company employs more than 300 people.
Connections Consult recorded a turnover of RON 32.3mn in 2020, an increase of 10.6% compared to 2019 (29.2mn). The largest share of revenue is generated by business process outsourcing services (2020: RON 22.7mn), followed by other service categories as IT infrastructure, software development and Robot Process Automation. The company’s net profit in 2020 amounted to RON 2.3mn, a 100% increase compared to 2019 (RON 1.15mn). By the end of this year, the company expects a turnover of RON 35.9mn and a net profit of RON 2.6mn.