You’ve already heard quite a bit from me this week, since I shared the latest buy news from the $100K Lock Box portfolio yesterday… but I’ve still got a few things to share with you to close out the week… including one more add-on buy. We’ve got news from a few of our Real Money Portfolio companies, but we’ll start with the one that has snuck into my top ten holdings of late…
The telegraphed acquisitions that PAR warned us about came quickly…
PAR Technology (PAR) seems to have gotten over the hump when it comes to getting investors to trust them about acquisitions… they had said on the earnings call a couple weeks ago that they were close to making some smaller deals to add cash-flowing software products to their portfolio, and two of those deals were announced this week. That will dilute shareholders at least a little bit, even though the acquisitions are marginally more profitable than PAR’s core business right now, and the stock did not really react. Which is probably a good sign that most PAR investors have “bought in” to CEO Savneet Singh’s strategy of using bolt-on acquisitions to build up what he calls PAR’s “restaurant operating system.”
These new acquisitions bring more diversification across businesses and some international diversification, so they’re additive in that way, and they should not require the high integration costs that PAR saw in trying to quickly integrate MENU last year and upgrade that software platform to work in the US market. Here’s how they describe the two additions in the press release — the first one is TASK, which works with a lot of the same companies as PAR in overseas markets, and similarly offers a pretty full portfolio of software tools for its customers, including a lot of large global chains:
TASK, an Australia-based global foodservice transaction platform, offers international unified commerce solutions, including interactive customer engagement and seamless integration, tailored for major brands worldwide. This has made TASK’s transaction management platform the platform of choice for some of the world’s most successful and recognized foodservice brands including Starbucks, and Guzman Y Gomez while its loyalty customer engagement platform is used by McDonald’s in 65 markets. With the addition of TASK, PAR will be able to serve the top enterprise foodservice brands across the globe with a unified commerce approach from front-of-house to back-of-house.
Task is publicly traded, ...