Starting and leading a successful company is an ambitious journey that can lead to remarkable success. As you get closer to the finish line, your company may attract interest from potential buyers who see value in what you’ve created. 

Whether it’s a full 100 per cent or majority stake sales, undertaking due diligence of the deal and understanding key considerations are important determinants of a successful merger and acquisition (M&A) transaction, and to ensure that each of their best interests is prioritised. 

The key terms in an M&A deal

When it comes to executing a successful M&A deal, there are many things to consider. 

Firstly, valuation is typically the easiest thing to agree upon. It should be agreed upon between the buyer and seller early on in the process. 

Rather than narrowing our focus on valuation, one should determine the ultimate cash consideration that will enter your pocket and the possible risk of liabilities post-closing. 

It is essential to draft commercial terms that are both beneficial and fair for both parties. Other than that, the liabilities of the company must be taken into account, as well as any warranties or guarantees that the founder is providing with the sale. With careful consideration of these factors, founders can have peace of mind knowing they are entering a fruitful transaction.

Also Read: Exit Strategies: Ways to get your money back besides IPOs and M&A

What to expect during the due diligence process

Understanding what to expect during the due diligence process is essential when a founder is looking to exit their company through M&A. The due diligence process involves financial, tax, operational, commercial, and legal aspects of the business, which will be closely assessed. 

After signing a non-disclosure agreement with the potential acquirer, financial statements and other financial documents should be prepared or used to verify financial history and status. It is also important to review tax returns in order to determine any issues that might arise. 

Moreover, potential buyers will examine all aspects of the business operations closely and review any associated contracts or documents. If there are any findings that could be less ideal, sellers could request further guarantees from sellers through representations and warranties. This part of the process can take several weeks or even months, depending on how detailed it needs to be.

How to negotiate the best possible outcome for yourself and your company

When negotiating the best possible outcome when exiting your company through M&A, it is important to recognise that every situation is unique; no two are the same. That being said, some key considerations for founders to keep in mind include understanding what you want and need from the deal and anything else that might hold value, such as continued involvement with the company or payment terms. 

It is also important to evaluate counterparty offers objectively, preparing both sides for a mutually beneficial agreement and creating an organised timeline of communications and activities. As a founder, this could be a great opportunity to create success for both yourself and your company, so striving for alignment between the goals of both parties can ensure everyone walks away happy.

Prior to entering into M&A negotiations, it is critical that you are clear on your objectives and the key terms of the deal. During due diligence, be prepared to share a lot of information about your company with the potential buyer. And finally, always remember to negotiate from a position of strength to get the best possible outcome for you and your business.

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The definition of a ‘good customer experience’ today is nowhere as simple or straightforward as it was just a few decades ago (when assessing customer sentiment was carried out through a few phone surveys, for example).

The modern consumer is multifaceted and complex, reacting to a wide range of factors: economic, social, political, and beyond, and they are more demanding than ever before.

Thus, Hire Digital provides insights into the latest customer experience trends in 2023.

Why customers are changing rapidly

Accenture’s survey reveals that 95 per cent of C-level executives believe that customers are changing faster than their businesses can keep up with. They think that their digital transformation efforts are just keeping them afloat rather than driving their growth.

So, what exactly drives these consumers to change? Here are some factors that are causing rapid changes in consumer behavior:

Looming inflation and unpredictable markets 

72 per cent of consumers state that external factors like inflation are impacting them now more than before. Meanwhile, Gartner’s research reveals that more than half of consumers feel like they have less disposable income and savings this year.

Also Read: BuzzAR is building the next big thing in Metaverse Marketing

Thus, their spending behavior has not only changed in such a way that they purchased less but in finding ways to make smarter purchases. For example, half of millennials and Gen Z are using digital tools to track coupons/discounts as a means to combat inflation.

The hybrid lifestyle

COVID-19 has opened doors for digital transformation. With a lot more products and services available online, people have adapted to the hybrid lifestyle of making purchases both online and in-person. According to Prosper Insights & Analytics, 33 per cent of adults are shopping in stores less.

Social and environmental responsibility

A Harris poll revealed that more than two-thirds of Americans are now more concerned about climate change and that they expect their peers to adjust their purchasing habits accordingly. This is supported by the aforementioned Accenture research, which indicated that 72 per cent of consumers are more impacted now by external forces – climate change being one of them. 

This leads us to our second insight into company ethics.

Company ethics influences buying decisions 

CX Network reported that customer experience practitioners observed a higher level of sustainability awareness from consumers. A lot of customers now consider companies’ level of environmental sustainability and morals in their purchasing decisions. An Aflac research supports this by showing almost eight out of 10 of consumers believe companies that stay true to their ethics/values outperform others in their field.

Meanwhile, 92 per cent of millennials are more likely to buy products from ethical companies, and over four-fifths of these consumers believe ethical brands outperform similar companies that lack a commitment to ethical principles. Thus, they want organisations they engage with to not only answer their needs but also add value to the world overall.

Customers are looking for more meaningful interactions

A Conduent report revealed that customers crave more meaningful interactions with brands. Eight out of 10 respondents would likely purchase products from the same brand if they had a great customer experience on a digital channel.

Here are factors that contribute to a meaningful customer experience:

Personalisation

Personalisation has been a marketing buzzword for a reason. A Gartner study pointed that 86 per cent of B2B and 72 per cent of B2C consumers expect companies to know their information during an interaction.

Also Read: We can no longer adopt a cookie-cutter approach to marketing: Gunalan Ram of CINNOX

Thus, it’s imperative to integrate mass data available for optimal personalisation. Some organisations fail to analyse all data sources and mostly rely on customer feedback.

However, strategies for optimisation and personalisation should be taken from integrated sources of demographics, operational data, financial data, purchase history, and more to truly understand the multi-dimensional needs of consumers. This also enables an organisation’s customer experience to evolve and keep up with consumer changes.

Convenience

Gartner’s research discovered that consumers’ value for convenience has been at an all-time high over the past 12 years.

Moreover, a Hyken ACA research shows that: 

• Three-fourths of customers would pay more for a convenient experience, and would switch companies if they found out a competitor provided more convenience
• 68 per cent would return to a brand if the customer experience were convenient
• 80 per cent would likely recommend a brand or product if it provides a convenient customer experience

The banking industry poses a good example of both adding a customer-centric integration design and adhering to convenience. In the recent decade, the banks immensely transformed with the current CX trends – opening a bank account used to take a painstaking process in-person, and now you can do so online within seconds.

Omnichannel

A McKinsey study revealed that organisations intend to increase digital engagement by 1.5x in 2024, and one of the top areas for investment is improving omnichannel via tech. Omnichannel is seen to make businesses more agile.

In fact, several surveys reported that consumers already expect an omnichannel experience; it’s no longer an edge over the competition but a must-have for organisations.

Also Read: How should you engage customers in a rapidly changing market?

However, a unified omnichannel experience is something you can have the edge over your competitors. As consumers are approaching organisations across all touchpoints, companies should ensure that all channels provide a cohesive messaging and seamless experience.

AI augmentation in customer experience

Harvard Business Review discovered that a combined effort from employees and artificial intelligence (AI) enables companies to achieve significant improvements.

Likewise, Gartner states that AI augmentation enables organisations to make smarter data-driven decisions. They predict that by 2025, organisations will shift 75 per cent of their operational work from production to more strategic activities if they use AI across marketing functions.

Using AI to optimise content and journey mapping leads to better segmentation and personalisation. Customer data retrieved from AI can be used to drive more agile responses.

Gartner lists down the main impact of AI augmentation:

• Applications of AI (i.e. automation, chatbots) are set to improve KPIs of timeliness, quality, and consistency.
• Machine learning and analytics can transform metrics into operational success.
• AI management requires greater focus to upskill and empower existing talent and end-to-end consideration of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

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In 2014, Surasit Sachdev launched an online restaurant reservation system in Thailand. Hungry Hub, however, failed as there was no real need for such a platform since one could walk into a restaurant and get a table easily in the country.

Curiously enough, one thing struck Sachdev while building the first version of Hungry Hub: the team’s monthly dinner budget exceeded his expectations. As he studied this problem further, Sachdev realised he was onto something big.

“We realised that some of our employees couldn’t afford dining out because of their moderate lifestyle/pay level,” Sachdev tells e27. For restaurants, it meant less traffic. “While there were many online restaurant booking apps, they thrived on heavy discounts, an unsustainable prospect. So in 2017, we decided to give Hungry Hub another chance before quitting it and help restaurants boost their revenues.”

This was the beginning of Hungry Hub 2.0.

Hungry Hub 2.0 is a restaurant and hotel reservation platform for special occasions that also provides fixed-price offers and gourmet delivery services. The app lets diners know how much they will pay and what they will get before walking into the restaurant.

At the same time, it helps restaurants generate sustainable revenues.

Also Read: ORZON Ventures joins Thai restaurant reservation platform Hungry Hub’s Series A round

“Given the culture in Asia, there are situations where one person pays on behalf of the entire table during parties, business meetings, dating, and birthday celebrations. But they don’t know what the people at the other end of the table will order. We at Hungry Hub solve this problem for billpayers. Meanwhile, it increases restaurants’ average check-ins and drives more traffic through our over a million monthly active users,” Sachdev explains.

Initial challenges

The first few months of Hungry Hub 2.0 were hard; convincing restaurants about the benefits of partnering with Hungry Hub was an uphill task. Restaurants didn’t want to upset their apple cart.

As Hungry Hub managed to resolve this issue, comes COVID-19. The pandemic and the resulting lockdowns forced it to focus on delivery.

“Although the lockdowns impacted our table reservation business, our food delivery unit and staycations helped us recover 50-60 per cent during those difficult times. As the pandemic threat was gone, we started growing again. We recorded tremendous growth in every quarter in the past three years except for the lockdown periods,” Sachdev claims.

According to him, Hungry Hub grew 2.5x year-over-year before the pandemic, and it is 60-80 per cent y-o-y post-pandemic.

In the past six months alone, the startup’s restaurant base has grown by over 30 per cent. It claims to have seated over two million diners and sourced over US$50 million to its partners.

So far, Hungry Hub has partnered with 1,200 restaurants/hotels across Bangkok, Pattaya, Hua Hin, Koh Samui and Phuket. Its partners include top restaurants, such as Copper Buffet, Audrey Café, The Coffee Club (Minor Group) and global hotels, such as Marriott, Anantara and Banyan Tree.

All across Thailand, there are more than 20,000 restaurants. This means Hungry Hub has only scratched the surface.

“While there are several online platforms in this space, they are either focused on the reservation system or deep discounts, which is very different from what we are doing. We are the leader for special occasion dining in Bangkok,” says the CEO of Hungry Hub, which takes a commission from diners.

Also Read: ‘Not all is doom and gloom’: Experts on the potential of AI to steal jobs in SEA

Trends

In the food ordering space, markets in Southeast Asia follow similar trends. However, Thailand has a slight edge as it attracts more tourists than others in the region.

Having said that, fine dining, omakase, and experience-based dining are the current trends in Thailand. “While people used to go out to eat to fill their stomachs in the past, today, it is more about what unique experience they can get from each meal to post on their Instagram and TikTok stories/reels,” Sachdev adds.

In July last year, Hungry Hub secured an undisclosed sum in Series A funding round from investors, including ORZON Ventures. Previously, it received its pre-Series-A stage funding from ECG Venture Capital and MOVF Media Group. In 2019, the startup bagged seed money from Expara and 500 TukTuks (a fund under Thailand’s 500 Global network). .

Hungry Hub is now in the market to raise up to US$5 million to grow its business beyond Thailand.

What is your immediate goal?

“Our immediate goal is to turn profitable within the first half of this year. We are on track to achieve this,” Sachdev concludes.

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Yinson Venture Capital, a subsidiary of Singapore-based Yinson Green Technologies (YGT), has made a strategic investment in Zeabuz, a Norwegian startup specialising in autonomous solutions for the maritime industry.

YGT’s strategic investments include an advanced hydrofoil system for electric vessels, e-bike and swappable batteries, autonomous and robotic technology, autonomous systems for electric vehicles, marine energy storage solutions and electric vehicle charging solutions.

Yinson Green Technologies plans to incorporate Zeabuz’s solutions in its electric vessels and utilise these technologies to boost the safety and efficiency levels of the vessels. It will also reduce the manning required during passenger and cargo transportation.

Also Read: Instill AI raises US$3.6M seed funding to make AI more accessible

Founded in 2019, Zeabuz has developed a proprietary autonomy platform suitable for both new designs and the retrofit of existing vessels. Its business model is to provide autonomy-as-a-service to operators of smaller vessels.

The startup is a spin-off of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s progressive research centre for autonomous marine operations and systems.

Zeabuz CEO and Co-Founder Erik Dyrkoren said, “Our technology enables our customers to offer safer and more efficient operations while enabling entirely new mobility concepts such as urban waterborne mobility with a reduced crew.”

YGT is the green technologies business unit of Yinson Holdings, a global energy infrastructure and technology company headquartered in Malaysia with a presence in 18 countries. YGT was established in 2020 as a green technologies solution provider delivering a clean, integrated and technology-enhanced ecosystem across the marine, mobility and energy segments.

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As we continue to explore the possibilities of Web3 and the metaverse, there are many different innovations showing up in the market. They all aim to offer something unique that can provide better experience for its users.

In the case of Netverse, that uniqueness lies in its status as a sharia-compliant metaverse that is said to be the first of its kind in the world.

Netverse is a product of the Islamic Business and Finance Network (IBF Net Group), the result of its partnership with Algorand Inc.

Similar to any other metaverse, Netverse is a shared virtual world that uses both immersive and blockchain technologies, writes IBF Net Group CEO Mohammed Alim in an email interview with e27.

The CEO explains that the use of immersive technology –such as AR/VR, mixed reality, and holography– enables users to “experience and feel” in a three-dimensional environment. But its “halal metaverse” status allows Netverse to provide a different experience.

“In a halal metaverse, users must socially interact with each other in an Islamically acceptable manner. Netverse imposes on its community a set of guidelines of social behaviour, which have been developed in consultation with Amanah Advisors, the UK-based Shariah Advisory partner of IBF Net. It sees certain forms of in-verse behaviour as inconsistent with Islamic etiquette and culture and penalises such behavior. Any complaint reported on such unacceptable behaviour is flagged and remedial or deterrent actions follow,” he said.

Also Read: Base bags pre-Series A for its organic, vegan, halal staple skincare products targeting Indonesian millennials

As the concept suggests, every transaction or financial contracting involving users inside Netverse must comply with the sharia regulations, in addition to country-specific financial regulations.

“Netverse hosts IBFNex, designed as a miniature Islamic economy on the blockchain, which comprises several platforms using smart contracts that cater to transactions in the philanthropy, not-for-profit, and commercial for-profit sectors of the Islamic economy. The smart contracts used to facilitate such transactions are free from riba (unjust enrichment), excessive gharar (fraud, deception, uncertainty, and complexity), qimar (gambling), and other elements prohibited by shariah,” Alim says.

What advantage does a sharia-compliant metaverse has?

“Ensuring Islamically acceptable behaviour by all residents of Netverse remains a key advantage of this shariah-based metaverse in addition to promoting a halal economy that is free from shariah-prohibited elements. Netverse is religiously and culturally acceptable to all users including the millennials who constitute the bulk of the community,” Alim explains.

“Indeed, it is a grave societal concern that young minds are exposed to a large amount of content that tacitly or explicitly encourages violence and promiscuity, given the increasing amount of time they tend to spend in a virtual environment. Netverse provides for healthy social interaction including Islamic education with gamification of contents, especially in the fields of economics and finance, in a virtual environment that the users prefer or are familiar with,” he continues.

Also Read: Evermos lands US$30M Series B to take its e-commerce platform for halal products to new markets

As a platform developed by IBF Net Group, Netverse users are mostly students, researchers, professors, scholars, and professionals interested in this field. With the growing role of technology in a halal economy, Alim says that the expanded community now includes members with a background or interest in information and web technology as well.

“Since the community in this niche area is largely dispersed across the globe, its user acquisition strategy has been and continues to be campus-focused. It has a significant presence in social media and tools of member acquisition include webinars, meetups, training events, certification courses, awards, data, and information-sharing,” Alim says.

Behind the metaverse

Netverse is developed by IBF Net Group, an online community that is focused on the field of sharia economy and finance that was founded in 1999.

Its involvement in the blockchain field includes the introduction of the IBFX token and a number of blockchain projects, which The Netverse has helped expanded by bringing them into the metaverse:

The Benevolence platform: A platform that allows project owners to mobilize donations of cash as
well as volunteer hours in a time-bound manner.

The Credence platform: A custodial service provider that facilitates conversion of various records, documents, certificates, endowment deeds, and many more into NFTs ensuring their safe storage, and perpetual and transparent access.

The Affluence platform: A marketplace that facilitates conversion of various assets into digital assets in the formof non-fungible tokens and their auction/sale in a transparent environment along with ensuring the flow of royalties and other legal payments to original creators through smart contracts. It has a unique feature of interest-free financing (qard) option based on collateral (rahn) of digital assets.

The Essence/Excellence platform: A marketplace that seeks to bring together buyers and sellers of halal goods and services including for-profit halal financial services. The Excellence platform is restricted to sale of e-learning courses.

Also Read: How blockchain can help combat ongoing fraud in the Halal food industry in SEA

IRSHAD (Intelligent Robo Shariah Advisor): An AI-powered chatbot that is well-equipped to engage with the user in a conversation regarding Zakat as an economic institution of philanthropy and empowerment of the poor and marginalised
sections of society. It is in the process of acquiring intelligence on Islamic inheritance and personal financial planning.

When asked about its plan for 2023, Alim says that a few major components of IBF Net’s plan for this year with respect to Netverse include expansion of the community, targeted to cross 100,000 mark by end of the
year covering all major university campuses that teach Islamic economics, business, and finance across the globe.

It also plans to expand beyond the existing virtual learning hub (Netversity) and virtual marketplace (Netbazaar) as a growing virtual edu-city, to be known as The Octagon (Rub-al-Hizb). The organisation also currently designs and offers learning programme in Islamic economics, business, and finance for students at senior school and pre-university levels, and conduct gamification of contents within existing portfolio of courses and certification programmes.

“The implementation of these plans would demand financial resources. IBF Net is now poised to launch a fund-raising campaign through a public sale of its in-verse token, followed by a sale and lease of virtual space and an invitation to institutional and individual investors to contribute to its capital,” Alim closes.

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Image Credit: IBF Net Group

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