In 2022, the local technology company Vendon not only concluded a very successful sale, but also showed a significant increase in turnover, exceeding the four million euro mark, says Kristiāns Vēbers, head of SIA Vendon.
This year, we intend to grow the turnover even faster, reveals K. Vebers, emphasizing that the goals set last year were met with flying colors, so it makes us hope that this year will also be successful for the company. It should be emphasized that last year’s results provided not only a sense of satisfaction, but also a financial benefit, because the sale transaction, which resulted in Vendon being owned by the Spanish international technology company Azkoyen, provides that Vendon will also receive an additional variable amount of up to four million from the new owner over the next three years euros depending on the fulfillment of the set goals. Although dozens of global investors expressed interest in the possibility of buying Vendon, the decision was made in favor of Azkoyen. They were consistent from the first day of cooperation and did not doubt for a moment that the purchase of Vendon would be a valuable investment, notes K. Weber.
Excerpt from the interview
Vendon was founded almost 12 years ago and is currently considered one of Latvia’s success stories. How did the idea of developing a remote control and monitoring solution for coffee and vending machines come about?
Vendon was born in the incubator of the information technology company Draugiem Group, when one of the representatives of the company group, Mapon, was approached by one of the largest operators of vending machines in Latvia, Selecta. At the time, most machines worked with cash, but Selecta wanted to introduce payments via SMS. At that time, Draugiem.lv had already delved into the specifics of SMS payments, so we realized that we could definitely develop such a technology. In the beginning, we experimented a lot and eventually we came to a working solution, which we decided to present to other European businessmen. We went to a technology industry exhibition in Germany, but in the first year we did not achieve the desired result. Many potential customers looked at our solution with interest and gave positive feedback, but this was not followed by real cooperation offers. Everyone expected something more – they wanted not only text message payment, but also a remote control and monitoring system, including product balance tracking, analytics, integration with resource management systems and other solutions. We returned home, started working on it actively and in 2011 we founded a separate company. The next time we came to the exhibition in Germany again, some market representatives were even surprised that we were still in business, pointing out that start-ups often do not survive until the second exhibition. Fortunately, this was not our case and we attended both the second and many other exhibitions, making the market players understand that we are serious about achieving our set goals.
It sounds like you were focused on foreign markets from day one?
Yes, there were only around 10 thousand such machines in the Baltics at that time, so we immediately focused on Europe, because the Latvian and Baltic markets were simply too small for us. There were more than four million machines in Europe at the time, so our goal was to export. After researching the market, we clearly knew that our solution had potential, as at the time most coffee and vending machine operators worked without the involvement of modern technology. This means that the owners of the machines often did not know for several weeks that their machine was switched off or broken, that some products were missing, or even that a theft had occurred. We realized that sooner or later the situation has to change, so we knew from the very beginning that such a solution has a future and will definitely be in demand. Success was inevitable, it was only a matter of time until the relatively conservative market was ready to open up to the new technology.
Read the whole article February 14 in Dienas Bizness magazine!
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