Rippleffect Studio

Aug 22, 2016

Idox is making another digital services acquisition on its quest to reach £100m in revenue in the medium term (see here and work back). After last months’ purchase of Open Objects in the health and social care space, Idox is now buying Liverpool-based digital agency Rippleffect Studio Ltd for £2m in cash. Rippleffect is a 70-person B2C player offering strategy and planning, user experience, web design and development, ecommerce, search engine optimisation and digital advertising. Clients include Everton and Liverpool football clubs, UK Sport, Visit Guernsey, Aldermore Bank, J D Wetherspoon and the Health Foundation. Rippleffect is in a hot space, but clearly underperforming. FY15 revenues were down 2% yoy to £6.3m, and it just broke-even with a net profit of £35k (down almost 60% on the previous year). Idox expects it to be earnings enhancing in year one, so a tight control on costs and focus on growth is going to be critical. The price of 0.3x revenue therefore sounds about right. Idox plans to integrate Rippleffect into the business, in conjunction with with its other recent digital acquisition of Reading Room (see here ). It will continue to be managed by its existing team reporting to the group MD responsible for Idox's digital agencies. Idox’s plan is to ‘expand its delivery of digital services across all its domains and sectors’. However it's not clear where the synergies lie between Rippleffect and Idox’s core in information management for the public and engineering sectors. This is key to achieving those all-important cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.