PCH International has acquired Canadian ecommerce platform ShopLocket in a significant strategic move by the company, which has its headquarters in Cork.
The supply chain solutions and development company said the acquisition would allow it to offer hardware start-ups “an entrepreneur-friendly” marketplace to launch and sell their products.
PCH chief executive Liam Casey told The Irish Times: "This will allow us create an end-to-end service for our customers from development to manufacturing to selling. It's a space we are very keen on and ShopLocket will allow us get products to consumers and communicate with them."
"The whole hardware space is on fire at the moment. It is a very exciting time," Mr Casey said, citing the sale of Nest, a smart home devices maker, to Google earlier this month for $3.2 billion (€2.3 billion).
"Look at Netflix – it was a platform [delivering movies and TV shows to the home] and now it creates its own content. Our unique content is the start-ups we are investing in and our incubators [called PCH Accelerator and Highway1]," Mr Casey said. "This deal will allow us become a merchant. The magic is in the space between being a platform and being a merchant."
Cost reduction
He said he hoped the acquisition of ShopLocket would help reduce the cost of start-ups bringing their products first to early adapters of technology, before their products are brought into the mainstream.
Toronto-based ShopLocket is an ecommerce platform that aims to allow users sell anything from a single item to a line of goods quickly and easily. Mr Casey said he had met the company to discuss working together in detail last November in Cork before PCH acquired the business for an undisclosed sum.
PCH has a turnover of $900 million and is predicted to have revenues of more than $1 billion a year in 2014 from supplying blue-chip brands such as Apple and Beats Electronics. Its operational base is in Shenzhen in China.
It also emerged yesterday that Mr Casey was an early investor in Stripe, the online payments company valued at $1.75 billion this week. "I was in the first funding round I think [in 2010]. My share is only zero-point-something." Mr Casey said.
