“For over 40 years, SISA has accumulated a powerful breadth and depth of expertise across the customs and logistics landscape in Switzerland that will enhance our global customs and localisation capability, and further strengthen our solutions for logistics providers throughout Europe,” he said.
“With Switzerland the ninth-largest economy by GDP in Europe, the third-largest trading partner with the EU for exports of goods and the fourth-largest trading partner with the EU for imports of goods, bringing SISA into the WiseTech group now consolidates our considerable geographic foothold in customs clearance and border compliance.”
One of the central claims made by short seller research firm J Capital last year was that WiseTech had been buying dud assets in order to maintain a facade of fast growth as the growth from the underlying business had slowed. Mr White vehemently denied the JCap allegations.
While locally both bullish and bearish analysts rejected the suggestion that WiseTech was using creative accounting measures to disguise its growth rate, the attack from JCap was successful in knocking 32 per cent off WiseTech’s share price by late December.
Following the announcement of the acquisition on Wednesday, WiseTech’s share price fell another 3.51 per cent to $23.11 by 11am.
Bulls, bears divided
One of the most bullish WiseTech analysts, Blue Ocean Equities’ Stuart Turner, believes this is a buying opportunity for WiseTech supporters, having upped his target price to $36.40 in late December. On the other end of the spectrum, bearish analyst Gareth James from Morningstar has a fair value price of $8.10 on the company.
In 2019 WiseTech announced five acquisitions, substantially fewer than the 14 it announced in calendar year 2018.
WiseTech states that its acquisition strategy is centred on accelerating long-term organic growth, through either geographic expansion or adding to its technological capabilities.
It’s not uncommon for the companies it acquires to experience a dip in revenue while they are being integrated into WiseTech’s cloud-based CargoWise One subscription platform, as many of the acquired companies generate revenue from one-time license sales, consulting and servicing businesses.
