Along the way, the company ended up in Australia via investors there and pulled out of the United States. MYOB claims to be "Australia and New Zealand's leading accounting software provider", meaning it is in head-on competition with Xero in the low-end cloud market in those countries. I think we'll see a lot of this return-to-the-public-market movement from ERP companies in private hands over the next few years as cloud products mature. To rattle off the names of companies that have gone private, these include Unit4, Epicor, Deltek and finally Exact, which delisted from trading on March 31. I'd guess over the next five to seven years, we'll see them all back if they are still independent. The key is the cloud. Exact's purchasers said that public investors are loathe to stick with companies through the necessary investment. In a prepared statement, MYOB CEO Tim Reed pointed to the importance of the cloud for his company. "We continued to capitalize on this strong base with rapid adoption from both new and existing clients, with 67 percent of new clients choosing cloud products and more than 116,000 paying subscribers using our cloud solutions as at 31 December 2014," Reed said.
MYOB GOING PUBLIC (AGAIN) Featured
The MYOB Group has filed for an initial public offering in Australia. The offering is expected to raise proceeds ranging from about $632 million to about $633 million and will return the company to the public market after six years in private hands. MYOB is owned by Bain Capital, which will not sell shares and which will hold about 57 percent of the shares after the offering. The name MYOB goes back to the Mind Your Own Business, software that originated in Rockaway, N.J.
