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sme stories
A good story of Italian entrepreneurship: intercepting a trend and transforming an intuition into a project that grows and is able to attract the interest of investors. This is the story of MeglioQuesto, a brand that we will undoubtedly hear more and more about in the coming years: because it was successfully listed on the AIM list of the Italian Stock Exchange, because it is growing robustly and because it offers other Italian companies (but also foreign ones, if you wish) a priority access route to meet, listen to and satisfy their customers.
A story, we said, and as in any self-respecting story there must be a beginning: it is 2011 when Felice Saladini, today CEO of MeglioQuesto, decides to found his own company. The sector he chooses is the same one where he started and where, in the meantime, he has grown up to become a manager with more than 4,000 colleagues: the one of telephone operators who take care of customer relations of large companies, once called call-centers and that today are something more and, in the case of MeglioQuesto, something different.
Today, through the telephone or the web, the consumer is directly in contact with his energy supplier, with a telephone company, with a company in any other sector involving a direct relationship with the customer, such as insurance companies: information, offers, problems to be solved, there are many situations in which one may need a direct, clear, qualified contact.
Saladini's intuition is to envisage even more: MeglioQuesto is headquartered in Milan, but the company is already present in 100 cities across the country and it is possible to go in over 400 physical points when necessary. Maybe in a corridor of a shopping center, maybe elsewhere. Moreover, the integration between personal and digital assistance is one of the characteristics of MeglioQuesto, which has created special figures: the Angels, personal assistants who already offer their support to consumers or potential customers on the MeglioQuesto.it website, and who are able to collect information and offer the right advice at the right time, guiding the choice between telephone rates, electricity&gas supplies, payTV, insurance, and even long-term car rental.
It is precisely this integration of three different types of contact - human, voice or digital - that has led MeglioQuesto to an interesting growth path: through the increase in turnover, the addition of new clients to the team, or also through the acquisition and merger of other similar or complementary companies to broaden the possibilities and increase the tools offered. All this while maintaining the guiding principle that is translated into the values professed by the top management and all the operators: transparency and clarity in communication, to maintain a relationship based on trust with the customer.
With this in mind, the concept of 'Customer for future' was introduced, a business vision that, in integrating physical and digital channels, offers to the customers the possibility of choosing the degree of material or immaterial relationship. A vision that proposes a new relationship between the consumer and those offering goods and services, through a constant choice of social and environmental sustainability.
Moreover, the Covid-19 health crisis has made even more clear the role that a company like MeglioQuesto can play in a context in which multichannel contact becomes decisive to acquire or maintain a direct line with customers, in which the overall experience cannot stop at the signing of a contract but must necessarily continue in a daily path in which every question can and must be answered.
Also for this reason, but also to look beyond the borders and start thinking bigger and bigger, MeglioQuesto decided to be listed on the Italian Stock Exchange in 2021: it chose the AIM list, the ideal place for a new company with high growth potential, and started with illimity a path that sees it working side by side as Nomad, Global Coordinator and Sole Bookrunner. In other words, illimity was the main partner in launching an IPO (Initial Public Offering) that has seen great results:
- a placement of over 1.6 million ordinary shares on the market;
- a collection of 17.25 million euros entirely allocated to a capital increase with a robust increase in the listing, in the first hours of trading, of over 60% compared to the placement price;
- an overall demand of around 5 times the offer;
- an average ticket higher than market quotations;
- a maximum level of the price range defined during the bookbuilding phase;
- approximately 100 investors, both Italian and foreign;
Listing on the stock exchange therefore becomes a useful tool even for a relatively young and medium-sized company to raise the capital needed to accelerate growth: it is no longer a point of arrival, but rather a starting point for building something even bigger. In this sense, illimity's role can be twofold: providing the company with capital in the initial phase, and supporting it in the listing process to ensure that it takes place in the most effective and advantageous way possible.
Furthermore, during 2022 the relationship between MeglioQuesto and illimity saw a further development, that of a financing aimed at accelerating the company's expansion and diversification strategy, both organic and through M&A, and to seize new market opportunities in several new sectors.
