Change of pilot at the head of SMAG, Montpellier publisher of software solutions for the agricultural and agro-industrial sector: as of June 1, Thomas Voisin will be the managing director of the company, a subsidiary of the agricultural cooperative group InVivo since 2014. He succeeds Didier Robert, who took up the post in June 2018 and is leaving the group.
LA TRIBUNE – You are not new to SMAG, since you were there from the beginning of the adventure?
Thomas VOISIN – For three and a half years, I managed the financial integration of subsidiaries abroad for the InVivo group, before becoming project director for Bioline by InVivo, the group’s agriculture division. But I was there at the beginning of SMAG since I was one of the co-founders, in 2001 with Stéphane Marcel (today chief digital officer of the InVivo group, Ed)de Neotic (became MaFerme-Neotic in 2012 after the merger with Maferme, then renamed SMAG in 2015, Ed.). Twenty years ago, we entered the market with a SaaS model that no one wanted, already with this spirit of game changer which has remained the DNA of SMAG… My profile as an agro engineer, cradled in digital and with financial skills, means that I have a hybrid and rather “Swiss army knife” vision.
How would you describe the digital transformation of the agricultural world today? I would say that it is both very committed and still in its infancy… The farmer gets up every morning with his tools on his mobile, he is ultra-equipped with connected machines, sensors, etc. It’s a universe”early adoptant“but we are only at the beginning of the adventure because there are still plenty of things to do to improve support for farmers in their practices, to minimize the environmental impact of agriculture, to communicate on the reduction in inputs,… This is another sector that has an image problem, whereas the professionals are doing a good job and really improving their practices.
SMAG, what is it today, in terms of numbers?
The company employs 140 people, for a turnover of around 12 million euros, of which 20% is exported, with several tens of thousands of users. There has been a downsizing (there were 195 in 2018, editor’s note), the result of a form of rationalization of production methods and perimeters, but also of the Covid impact… Despite everything, we are recruiting: currently, we have between 10 and 15 positions to fill, on developer profiles principally.
What is your roadmap?
We want to accelerate the transformation full SaaS, even though today, already 88% of our turnover is made in recurrence. Regulations, uses and digitization evolve, we must have tools that do not sleep on shelves! My roadmap is to continue to grow the use of our solutions with farmers in France, develop internationally and also continue to work with agro-industrialists.
