A bit more digging around this morning and came across the LinkedIn profile of the Head of People, Culture and Engagement at Covata.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentmaquinad
An except from the profile reads
"My focus is to help grow the teams and
open up new offices in the US, Europe and Latin America"
So putting two and two together, and revisiting the most recent investor update where the company stated that it's confident of having a sign up from the LATAM region before 31st March 2016... in my humble opinion I believe this deal is done and dusted and they are probably going through the finer points before an update is made to market.
Some of the candidates include:
- America Movil SAB de CV
- Telefonica SA
Just to give you some perspective, both these pretty much have higher market caps than Telstra...so yea...
Asia Deal
As per the most recent update the company said the following with regards to business growth
"The Company will focus in the short term on augmenting its current relationships in the United States and
building a presence in Asia amongst Institutional and Sophisticated Investors."
"MZ has 7 offices globally including 5 in North America,
Hong Kong, Taipei and São Paulo and has extensive networks across Europe."
So this would tie in nicely with the most recent update to investors where CVT again said that its confident they could sign up a Telco from Asia before 31st March 2016.
My take is they probably have bagged a major player and using this as leverage to get MZ involved to essentially enhance the value/sales pitch to the insto's and soph's in Asia. Remember Asia traditionally has embraced disruptive techno fairly quickly compared to other regions.
Here there are so many potential candidates.....some big Telco's in Japan (KDDI Corp, SoftBank Corp, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Group, NTT DOCOMO Inc) and China (China Mobile Lt, China Telecom Corp Ltd). All with higher market caps as compared to Telstra (domestic proxy).
Finally for me...two very important take away's from yesterday's ann....
"Firstly, contracts may increasingly shift from a per-user per-month subscription model to enterprise-wide/whole of department annual contracts; mostly for 3, 5 or 10 year terms."
"Secondly, our two people working directly in UK Government and our Pre-Sales professional in Germany have shown that direct contact with the customer provides us full visibility of the ‘deal’ in hand. With government and in enterprise-wide deals, the customer typically demands to be working directly with the vendor."
This is basically hinting at no need for a MSP when they have found it to be more efficient/effective to the client directly....i.e. no need for any revenue sharing.
Will be watching this very keenly from now on...
(20min delay)
