CLOTILDE GAILLARD
Posted on 15/10/2024
With immense digitization potential in the fleet management
The acquisition of Optimum Automotive by Shiftmove aims to create a rich and diversified data hub.
© Shiftmove
The German-Swiss software platform for fleet management Shiftmove officially announces that it has acquired Optimum Automotive. This merger will make it possible to manage more than 550,000 vehicles and support around 18,000 corporate customers.
As defined by Daniel Vassallucci, CEO and founder of Optimum Automotive, the French company is “an 18-year-old start-up that offers fleets of all sizes tools to optimize the costs and TCO of their fleet as well as to decarbonize their mobility.”
Mainly European in scope, it operates in France, Portugal, Spain, Spain but also in Africa and has 2,000,000 vehicles managed for 7,500 professional customers.
Shiftmove, for its part, was born in 2023 from the alliance between the Avrios and Vimcar entities. Its fleeter business is based on a combination of software and telematics supported by AI that has seduced companies such as UK Appliances or CB Schenker.
Moreover, it is this challenge linked to data — allowing the automation of tedious manual processes thanks to the in-depth analysis of vehicle data — that prompted Optimum Automotive to follow Shiftmove in its aggregation project.
A partnership that does not hide its ambition
... to form a group on a global scale of fleet management “with 1 million vehicles managed within our customers' organizations by 2027”, aims Wouter Hendriks, CFO of Shiftmove.
He explains the choice of this assimilation with a French player because, “with 9 million commercial vehicles, France is a key, mature and competitive market and therefore important for the development and growth of our company”.
A year of discussion before reaching a union
With discussions between Optimum Automotive and Shiftmove having started a little over a year ago, the operation was launched on October 1, 2024 but was only revealed on October 15.
The digitization potential of fleet management Proving to be immense, this acquisition of Optimum Automotive by Shiftmove should lead to the creation of a rich and diversified data hub.
This is in order to deliver services based on algorithms and help fleet managers make the best decisions at the right time through a single tool.
For good reason: “The fleet management market is highly fragmented and, in Germany, we note the average use of 8 different tools to manage a fleet”, notes Wouter Hendriks.
A promising future together
“For now, nothing will change and Optimum Automotive will continue to manage the French market with its long-standing expertise and high customer satisfaction. With Optimum Automotive, we will now be able to reach even more businesses in Europe, thus expanding our footprint and impact on the sector,” adds the Shiftmove CFO.
For him, “the coming months and years will show how we can make the most of our synergies, so that even more businesses can benefit from our joint digital fleet solutions.”
For his part, Daniel Vassallucci is pleased to “benefit from a group effect, particularly in terms of tools and a volume of data, by making concrete proposals for our customers.”
In short, “alone we go faster but together we go further”, concludes the CEO and founder of Optimum Automotive, a philosopher.
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