It’s kind of a big deal
Don’t write about the money.
But when the money is €473 million, it’s pretty hard not to. I mean, come on, €473 million! You could almost buy four Declan Rices for that. Almost. You’d have to leave €11 million worth of the last one behind which could be, I don’t know, maybe half an arm? So, we can’t ignore that we’re talking about big money here.
No wonder so much of the coverage of SoftBank’s acquisition of a 51% stake in Irish-based Cubic Telecom has started with that €473 million figure. It’s a lot of money, so much so as to be quite distracting from everything else. It almost has a distortionary effect.
I’ve seen one writer claim that the size of the purchase makes it the largest software deal in Ireland. Elsewhere, an early investor in the company, John Flynn of Act Venture Capital, claimed it had shattered the “glass ceiling of ambition” for Irish companies. So, as you can see, the amount of money being paid by SoftBank is very significant in terms of the potential impact of the deal and how it reverberates across the Irish market.
As to what it means beyond the €473 million, Barry Napier, CEO of Cubic Telecom (pictured), and COO Shane Sorohan, tried to articulate that in a joint blog post, stating that the two companies would “pioneer the era of the software defined connected vehicle (SDCV)”. The partnership had come “at the perfect time”. Car owners were “starting to care less about traditional selling points like brake horsepower and more about the overall in-car experience”, they argued.
Cubic Telecom had the technology and capability to help car companies to “capitalise on the enormous commercial opportunities [of] the SDCV era. Working with SoftBank will enable us to scale this rapidly and reach a wider audience of OEMs”, they added.
For the average person on the street – or should that be, driving their car – the detail of what Cubic Telecom does can appear quite complex. Acronyms like IoT and terms like ‘mobility-as-a-service’ or ‘software-defined connectivity’ can be off-putting for many. All they want to know is what it means for their future driving experience. How it’s done isn’t really that important to most people. That’s why they might latch on, instead, to the fact a company is paying €473 million to make their future driving experience better. Clearly, it must be able to do that well.
The figure also serves as a kind of validation of the whole SDCV concept, if only because it would be an awful lot of money for SoftBank to splurge on a reckless gamble.
Away from the money, another interesting detail is the involvement of Endeavor Ireland, which was launched in 2019 to “assist ambitious founders across the island of Ireland” and had selected Napier as one of its Endeavor Ireland Entrepreneurs. The board chair of Endeavor Ireland is U2’s The Edge and he was quoted on the RTE website saying: “Barry’s story demonstrates that the secret to success is grounded in hard work, perseverance and a pay-it-forward attitude, which is what Endeavor is all about.” While it’s always nice to get an endorsement from a member of U2, it also serves to explain why Bono is the lyricist in the band.
While there’s an awful lot of songs about cars and driving, I can’t help wondering if Napier and Sorohan might have been happier singing the lyrics from one particular U2 song when the SoftBank deal was announced.
Altogether now: “It’s a beautiful day.”
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