Case Study Asterion: Back to the future.
The European group based in Viernheim and Paris is a leading IT company that focuses on developing solutions for automating customer communications. BAVARIA Industries Group took over the company, whose turnover was around EUR 100 million at the time, as a carve-out from American company Pitney Bowes in 2013.
The company was a hotchpotch of around 15 European branches and 30 customer sites as fulfilment centres. The group was posting significant losses as it was subcritical in terms of size in many locations and often merely served as an extended sales arm for Pitney Bowes solutions. In addition to this, the market conditions were changing rapidly as invoices were increasingly sent electronically and the company’s traditional key mainstay, scanning in and sending letters, went sharply into decline.
The newly appointed management firstly defined possible new fields of business, particularly in the area of e-mail communications and robotics. Production sites were merged, closed or sold with the support of the BAVARIA team. The group’s turnover consequently fell dramatically. Its customers, particularly those in the banking sector, tended to scan those letters that still needed to be scanned internally again in order to utilise capacity better as their staff numbers were too high, causing turnover to decline even further. Nevertheless, it was subsequently possible to increase the company’s operating return to 8% in 2016 thanks to newly developed e-mail communication solutions and sales partnerships.
The company’s project pipeline has now grown considerably. New technical solutions in the area of robotic processes and automation as well as the development of a technical product centre in Nantes are enabling ASTERION to achieve better sales once again.