Why Zebra Technologies (ZBRA) Is Buying Reflexis For $575 Million

By Amit Chowdhry ● Jul 28, 2020
  • Zebra Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ: ZBRA) — a company at the front line of business with solutions and partners that deliver a performance edge — announced it is buying Reflexis Systems for $575 million.

Zebra Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ: ZBRA) — a company at the front line of business with solutions and partners that deliver a performance edge — announced it is buying Reflexis Systems for $575 million. Reflexis Systems is a privately-held leading provider of intelligent workforce management, execution, and communication solutions for organizations in the retail, food service, hospitality, and banking industries.

What is Reflexis? Reflexis a global market leader in retail task management and a leader in workforce management.

The Reflexis ONE intelligent work platform is used by hundreds of customers around the world to achieve measurable improvements in customer engagement along with associate productivity and retention. And Reflexis ONE enables managers to schedule hours against projected traffic demand and task requirements. Plus it also gives store associates a single place to view assigned tasks from all levels of the organization which can then be monitored for completion.

As a Zebra PartnerConnect Premier ISV partner, Reflexis empowers digital natives (the new generation of front-line workers) who expect technology solutions to help keep them connected and facilitate their work.

Customers are going to benefit from the acquisition as Zebra continues to provide innovative solutions to retailers, complementing its current software offerings like Zebra Prescriptive Analytics, Workforce Connect, and SmartCount with Reflexis’ unique combination of workforce and task management. And together, Zebra and its partners will utilize these edge software assets to help customers – in retail and other key vertical markets – elevate the performance of their teams and businesses by fueling front-line workflows with richer and larger sets of real-time data.

Reflexis — which is a portfolio company of Great Hill Partners and Sageview Capital — achieved sales of approximately $66 million in 2019, doubling over a 3-year period with gross margin approximately 20 percentage points higher than Zebra. And the scale, vertical market expertise, and go-to-market footprint of Zebra is expected to create substantial synergies.

Zebra is expecting to fund the $575 million purchase price with a combination of cash on hand along with fully committed financing available under its credit facility.

The deal is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval. And it is expected to close by early in the fourth quarter of 2020.

Zebra expects this transaction to have an immaterial impact to earnings in year one and to be increasingly accretive beyond year one as we scale the business.

Goodwin Procter LLP is acting as legal counsel to Reflexis. And Kirkland & Ellis LLP is serving as legal counsel to Zebra.

KEY QUOTES:

“The acquisition of Reflexis Systems fits squarely within our Enterprise Asset Intelligence vision of making every worker and asset at the edge connected, visible and fully optimized. Combining Reflexis’ market-leading platform with our complementary software offerings provides us the unique opportunity to unify the store associate experience and empower every front-line worker to execute the best next action. We are excited to welcome the Reflexis team to the Zebra family.”

— Anders Gustafsson, Chief Executive Officer of Zebra Technologies

“We are pleased to join Zebra and help build its strong position in retail with our compelling, differentiated worker efficiency solution. Our team has built a market-leading platform and application that has scaled to accommodate rapid growth over the last three years. We look forward to applying our expertise in directing associate activity to more profitable execution for customers while helping provide greater meaning to an associate’s workday.”

— Prashanth Palakurthi, Founder and CEO, Reflexis Systems, Inc