Digiweb set to acquire Smart Telecom from examinership process
Smart entered examinership in August, with debts of around €70million.
The company was previously taken over by Cavan businessman and Kingspan co-founder, Brendan Murtagh, who had invested much of his own money into turning around the fortunes of the troubled telco.
Earlier this year Smart managed to reduce costs – largely through redundancies (it currently employs nearly 60 people) – and eradicated earlier operating losses. It also switched customer focus from residential users to corporate and governmental clients.
Yesterday, it was announced that – pending creditor and High Court approval – Digiweb, which specialises in a number of services, including broadband, telephony, web server hosting and managed services, would acquire the entire assets and customer base of Smart.
In a statement, released yesterday, Smart said the new deal would “consolidate the telecoms market, creating a stronger service provider with a broader range of services for existing and prospective customers”.
The enlarged entity – while Smart would become part of the larger Digiweb group, it would remain as a separate brand – will have a total broadband/data and telephony subscriber base (made up of residential, governmental and business customers) of around 46,500 clients, along with a further 48,000 web-hosting, domain and data centre customers.
“The truly national scale and resources of the combined company would allow us to expand our product offering and service capabilities to our existing customer base,” said Smart’s chief financial officer, Brendan Hunt.
