Integrator invests in France after selling off three other divisions

Integrator Morse has made a ‘significant’ new investment in France, despite selling three of its European divisions in the past year.

The firm sold its French subsidiary Morse France SAS last year for £11m (CRN, 18 July 2005) and last week offloaded its loss-making German and Austrian units for 9.5m euros, as revealed by CRN Online.

However, Peter Critchley, strategy director at Morse, told CRN: “We are still looking to invest in the services approach. We had already divested ourselves of our French business and we have now done the same in Austria and Germany.

“It was clear that the French business was not going to transform from its reseller roots, and it wasn’t sensible to continue investing in that direction. We came to the same conclusion with the German and Austrian businesses.”

Critchley declined to go into further detail on Morse’s latest investment, but said it involved “recruiting staff and setting up a business in France”.

He added: “We have transformed the UK business into a services-led organisation. But we are prepared to make tough decisions company-wide and reinvest in other areas.

“We are always on the lookout for new opportunities. It’s easy to talk about transforming, but we need to put our money where our mouth is.”

Alastair Edwards, senior analyst at Canalys, said: “In the UK Morse has a very strong brand and it has been able to transform the business using its installed base. The problem lies with trying to replicate that in a foreign market. Because it no longer has the presence with the volume scale through a reseller operation, it does not have the foundations to build on existing relationships as in the UK. The only real way to do this is to make a sizeable acquisition in these markets.”