ChinaTravelNews – Shiji Technologies’ wholly-owned subsidiary Jiaodian Information will invest 25 million euros in three stages to acquire 44,462 newly issued shares, equivalent to 55.45% equity, of Austrian hotel data management company SnapShot.
An initial 7 million euros will be paid for 21,519 Snapshot shares at 325.3 euros per share. When SnapShot achieves targeted business results, a second payment of 11 million euros will be made for 17,405 shares at 632 euros per share. The final payment of 7 million euros for 5,538 shares at 1,264 euros per share will be made when SnapShot attains the second-stage performance targets.
SnapShot mainly operates in technical analysis of data platforms, online and offline training for hotel business strategy and consulting services for hotel demand management.
As the growth of domestic hotel business for Shiji Technologies has reached a plateau in the past two years, it has taken the strategic step of acquiring Snapshot to prepare for overseas expansion. Both parties are hoping to build up Snapshot as a hotel industry data platform to create values and provide training, servicing, data consolidation and apps for hotels and hotel groups.
One analyst said that SnapShot will give a boost to the hotels demand management and would be able to accumulate hotel operational data.
1. SnapShot offers an integrated solution to hotels that includes a technical data analysis platform, hotel business strategy training and hotel demand management consulting. Its automated data service replaces time-consuming manual data collection, filing and analysis tasks and allows hoteliers to make data analysis and forecasts according to demand management principles and related sales, finance and management data. Ultimately hotels can make better demand management and marketing strategies with the Snapshot suite.
2. Hyatt Hotels has already used data forecast analysis to improve its service capacity and RevPAR. Executive director Chris Brogan said: “A Hyatt Hotels project in the USA launched in 2014 increased RevPARby by 60% in y-o-y.”
3. Compared to Hyatt Hotels, which only conducts analysis on its own data, SnapShot can obtain and process data from multiple hotels within a region and, if usage of its services grows, it will become a major data platform and value-added service provider for the hotel industry.
The SnapShot acquisition is also an important step for Shiji Technologies to break into hotel data operations, as “software as a service (SaaS)” operations and data-based added value services will replace licensing as the main source of income for software companies over the long term.
This is the first overseas investment for Shiji Technologies and closely follows Ctrip’s acquisition of UK-based low-cost carrier platform Travelfusion this year. The move is yet another indicator that Chinese companies are beginning to carve their territories in the overseas travel tech field.(Translation by David)
