Dusseldorf The founders Stefan and Sebastian Hamann have built their company Shopware into one of the leading providers of e-commerce software over the past few years. Now they want to take the next step together with investors. “We see the prospect of bringing Shopware into the top five worldwide,” says Stefan Hamann.
The payment service Paypal and the private equity company Carlyle are investing a total of 100 million US dollars in Shopware, as the company from Schöppingen in Münsterland announced on Tuesday. Shopware, which has so far only grown under its own steam, wants to use the capital to compete with industry giants such as SAP or Salesforce with a new technical platform.
Selling shares in the company for the first time was not easy for the founders. “When you have managed and financed a company alone for 20 years, it is also a huge personal step to bring in an investor,” says Stefan Hamann in an interview with the Handelsblatt. However, he now sees a time window of two to three years for the step into expansion. “We would be annoyed afterwards if we hadn’t seized this opportunity,” says the 38-year-old.
The basic requirement has always been that they retain the majority in the company, adds his brother Sebastian, 36. “This is not an exit event, we believe fully in the company and are very keen to take it to the next level,” emphasizes he. But they are also aware that they cannot do it on their own.
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Shopware operates in a highly competitive market with its software for e-commerce. In addition to the large system providers such as SAP, Salesforce or Adobe Magento, there are numerous German start-ups such as Spryker or Commercetools, which are expanding aggressively with new approaches and financially strong investors.
Profitable from the first year of business
The benchmark is Commercetools, in which the retail group Rewe also has a stake. According to its own statements, the company already achieved annual sales of 50 million euros in the middle of last year. Commercetools raised another $140 million from investors in 2021 and was valued at $1.9 billion. One of the stars of the industry is also the Canadian Shopify, which is aimed more at smaller retailers and is therefore not a direct competitor to Shopware.
Spryker is very present in the market, which has recently been able to poach some executives from Salesforce and SAP and has just contributed the software for Aldi Süd’s first checkout-free supermarket in London. According to the latest available data from the “Bundesanzeiger” in 2019, Spryker Systems made a loss after taxes of nine million euros with sales of ten million euros. However, at the end of 2020 they received a financial injection from a consortium of investors in the amount of 130 million euros.
According to the “Bundesanzeiger” 2020, Shopware was able to increase its turnover from 26 to 31 million euros. And what sets the company apart from many other start-ups: it was profitable from the very first year. In 2020, it achieved a profit after taxes of three million euros. “The fact that we worked profitably right from the start is also anchored in our Münsterland DNA,” says Stefan Hamann, adding jokingly: “My grandmother would probably have hit me with a broom if we had made losses.”
In 2001, the brothers started an agency that solved the IT problems of companies in the neighborhood. At that time, her uncle, who ran an office machine shop, wanted to get into online trading. Since they couldn’t find any suitable software that met their expectations, they developed a solution themselves.
Over the years, they specialized more and more in the field of e-commerce, since 2007 they have been a pure software developer. “With Shopware, we are focused on medium-sized companies,” explains Stefan Hamann.
Philips, Jägermeister and Mars use the software
In the meantime, however, large companies such as Philips, Jägermeister or Mars also rely on Shopware. In total, a platform turnover of 20 billion euros runs through the company’s systems worldwide. The number of employees is set to increase from 350 to 500 this year.
In 2019, they launched Shopware 6, a system based on a completely newly developed technical basis. “The market has changed so fundamentally over the past ten years that we needed something new,” explains Stefan Hamann.
“Switching to Shopware 6 was a huge challenge. Half of the customers were enthusiastic that we were investing in the future, the other half were concerned about the system change,” says Stefan Hamann. “It was a bit bumpy at the beginning,” he admits, “but we coped well.”
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Sven Kramer is the managing director of the Liquam consultancy, which, among other things, evaluates shop systems for its corporate customers. He praises the company from the Münsterland region: “Basically, one can say that Shopware has rethought its shop system with version 6 and is thus serving future trends and the expectations of shop operators.” Shopware is considerably more open and flexible than solutions from the competition.
Accolade from the IT consultancy Gartner
This is also due to the fact that Shopware relies on the “open source” principle for its latest version, which means that they disclose their source code to other developers. “In this way, we had thousands of developers who worked on the system from very different perspectives and industries,” explains Sebastian Hamann. As a result, the platform can be tailored to the very different requirements of medium-sized companies.
The shoe manufacturer Wortmann, with its brands Tamaris and S.Oliver Shoes, has recently started using the new “Guided Shopping” application, which was specially developed for trading with business customers. The company can use video to support the affiliated specialist shops in their selection and present the new collections to them – as an efficient alternative to the field service.
It was an accolade for Shopware that it was included in the so-called “Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce” by the renowned IT consultancy Gartner for the first time in 2020, which assesses the most important software manufacturers in e-commerce. Although they are listed there as niche players, they are praised for their user-friendliness and their wide range of possible uses.
A disadvantage from the point of view of many international customers was that Shopware has so far been very heavily focused on the German-speaking area, says consultant Kramer. But that is exactly what is to change with the help of the new shareholders. “This financing will help us to accelerate our international growth,” hopes Stefan Hamann.
And Carlyle Managing Director Michael Wand, who is to join the Supervisory Board, emphasizes that the investor wants to support the company in “becoming a leading international technology company in digital commerce”.
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