One of SWARCO’s senior executives has told Highways News last week’s acquisition of Dynniq Mobility offers the scale of two major European ITS Companies that is needed to keep on top of technical developments.
SWARCO announced on Thursday it has acquired the Dynniq subsidiary – something Vice President Jeremy Cowling (Pictured, second from left) explained had been in the company’s sights since Imtech was snapped up private equity company Egeria in 2015.
“We have long recognised the strategic value of bringing the two businesses together and have been in discussion with Egeria for some time” Mr Cowling explained. “It’s been quite a long process – detailed discussions began in January, and formal due diligence since March.
“We don’t really see it as an acquisition – we see it as a merger. The deal means we get double the R&D resource, a bigger installed base and successful operations in the Netherlands, UK and Scandinavia. We’re getting expertise which is vital at the moment, when the industry is facing a recruitment challenge. We’re getting many more of the right people with the right expertise to add to our pool of our domain experts.”
Work is already underway to integrate the two teams and there are planned to be joint events at the ITS World Congress next week in Hamburg.
“One of my first jobs is to work out the branding situation,” added Business Development Manager Andrew Walker. “The acquisition doesn’t include Dynniq’s parking and energy businesses, so we need to stop using the Dynniq brand in two years. We also now own the famous Peek name and know there is still plenty of value in that, so we’ll think carefully about branding.”
Jeremy Cowling added that there is a small amount of cross-over in the product portfolio which needs considering, but it won’t be a case of just using SWARCO products when there is overlap. “As I say, this is a merger not a take-over,” he added. “We are going to listen and make decisions based on an open discussion on the best way forward. This will be a merit based decision.
“Dynniq have taken a different path on C-ITS and have made some great progress. They have a more mature inter-urban control system and that’s something that could take SWARCO forward. We’re looking at ImFlow and ImCity to see how they fit with our own MyCity product, and we’ll look at them and take the best of both to provide a really top-quality traffic management solution.”
(Picture – SWARCO and Dynniq senior management team)
