Vianet Grp Regulatory News (VNET)

15 May 2023

Vianet Group plc

("Vianet" or the "Group")

Strategic acquisition of trade and assets

Vianet Group plc (AIM: VNET), the international provider of actionable data and business insight through devices connected to its Internet of Things platform ("IOT"), today announces that it has acquired the trade and assets of Beverage Metrics Inc ("BMI"), a Denver, USA based provider of inventory software solutions to the USA hospitality sector, a wholly owned subsidiary of Identec Group AG.

The acquisition consists of customers, an established operating platform, software IP, patents for barcode 3D scanning and advanced technology for point-of-sale data integration. BMI's five employees will be incorporated into Vianet's USA subsidiary Vianet Americas Inc. ("VAI") which has worked closely with BMI over the past couple of years.

The initial consideration payable to BMI is £577,500 and will be satisfied in the form of the issue of 700,000 new ordinary Vianet shares at a price of 82.5p each with deferred consideration payable dependent on revenue performance metrics. The deferred consideration is 7% of net revenue of VAI for the period 01 April 2024 through 31 December 2028, payable in cash and capped at a maximum of £4 million.

For the year ended 31 December 2022 the loss attributable to the acquired trade and assets was approximately £0.76 million and the independent valuation of the acquired trade and assets was approximately £1.22 million.

The combination of Vianet's SmartDraught draft beer management solution with BMI's inventory platform provides a comprehensive one stop drinks management solution which enables operators to reduce costs, improve productivity and maximise sales, thereby driving improved profitability across the entire drinks category. SmartDraught integration with the inventory platform will also enable Vianet to provide a more cost effective and competitive brand monitoring and market insight solution for the brewers.

Together with our recent investment in SmartDraught this acquisition positions Vianet's hospitality operations firmly on the path to growth in the UK and to establishing a profitable footprint in the USA. The management looks forward to elaborating further at the time of our FY 2023 results announcement on Tuesday 13 June 2023.

Application has been made for a total of 700,000 new ordinary shares to be admitted to trading on AIM ("Admission"). Admission is expected to occur on 19 May 2023. Following Admission the total number of voting rights in the Company is 29,508,914. This figure may be used by shareholders as the denominator for the calculations by which they will determine if they are required to notify their interest in, or a change of interest in, the Company under the FCA's Disclosure and Transparency Rules.

James Dickson, Chairman of Vianet, commented:

"We are delighted to acquire the trade and assets of BMI. Having worked alongside the team for some years we understand both the quality of the people and the excellence of the software and we believe that combining their products and skillset into the Vianet business will give us a truly market leading offering.

This increased presence in the USA together with our evolving strategic relationships will give us a significant boost in growing our presence in what is a huge market, as well as providing us with increased opportunities in our UK hospitality operations.

Vianet has had an encouraging start to FY2024 and looks forward to the future with great confidence." 

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About Vianet

Vianet Group capture and process operational data to produce critical insight, analysis and actionable information enabling customers to transform business performance.

Since its Admission to AIM in 2006, the Group has grown from its core beer monitoring business to widen its offering and develop new businesses, especially in vending telemetry and contactless payment solutions particularly for the premium coffee sector.

Servicing over three hundred customers across the world and rendering live data to our IOT platform from a footprint of over 210,000 connected devices daily, Vianet is one of the largest business to business connected solutions providers in Europe with established long-term relationships with blue chip customers and growing recurring revenues which are over 85% of our total revenues.

In our Smart Machines division, we connect a single data gathering device to a customer's asset or system. The device then sends data back via our IOT platform to cloud based servers. The flexibility and functionality of the device means the technology can be applied to any machine which has the capability to output data. In our award-winning end-to-end solution the device is also used to connect our contactless payment solution and communicate payment terms to our cloud-based payment services providers.

The Smart Zones division is where we connect multiple data gathering devices into one or more systems or assets with the data from those devices being communicated back to our IOT platform via a single 4G LTE communications hub. The technology was originally developed for beverage and asset management in drinks retailing but can be used with any data gathering device with a digital output such as gaming machines, utilities management. and POS.

For further information, please visit www.vianetplc.com