Fleetmatics well set for the road ahead

ONE MORE THING:It might be little known here but Dublin-headquartered and New York-listed software group Fleetmatics appears to be really motoring at present.

Chief executive Jim Travers was in town this week to announce its intention to hire 15 software engineers at its base in Tallaght. It has also signed a contract with South Dublin County Council to fit its 303 vehicles with the company's fleet management software.

Enda Kenny was on hand to officially open its global headquarters, which houses its product development centre.

Fleetmatics has 50 staff currently in Dublin and Travers told me that the plan is to double this number over time.

Its Irish roots date back to the involvement of Bill McCabe's Oyster Capital. McCabe is no longer an investor but Travers said it plans to build on its Irish background and use it as a launch pad into continental Europe.

"Today, we don't have a presence in continental Europe but we plan to build one from Ireland," he told me.

Travers said the data centre in Dublin could support customers throughout Europe and possibly farther afield.

About 80 per cent of Fleetmatics' business is based in the US and Canada, with the balance in Ireland and the UK, where it has an office in Reading.

Fleetmatics enjoyed a successful IPO in New York in October. It listed at $17 and the shares have risen by about 50 per cent since then.

Its business model is primarily about fitting its software to fleets of trucks operated by SMEs. But it recently signed a major deal with US cable group Comcast covering 15,000 vehicles. "Believe it or not, they had no system in place," he says.

The software tracks the movement of trucks and supplies a range of data to the owners of the fleets and to Fleetmatics.

Typically, companies sign up for three years and pay a fixed monthly fee. In return, the owners can achieve significant efficiencies from this close monitoring of their fleets and should improve the service to customers.

Might Fleetmatics look at a secondary listing on the Irish Stock Exchange?

"We would consider it but it's not on the horizon," Travers said.

He said accounting issues that arose last year prior to the IPO had been dealt with by it beefing up its team in this area.

Travers said this was a function of the company still being relatively young and having focused most of its early energies on securing investment and capturing sales. "We have hardened our systems," he said.

The strong share price performance indicates that this is not a major issue for investors and with $100 million in cash on its balance sheet, Fleetmatics looks well set for the road ahead.