Spotlight on Technology: Concur Technologies

In the big scheme of the travel ecosystem, corporate travel represents about 25% of all of the 2 billion trips taken and there is a player in Redmond, WA that intends to touch as many of those trips as possible – and it is NOT Microsoft.

Today we are going to shift gears to corporate travel technology and take a look at Concur Technologies, founded in 1993.   Concur is based in Redmond, WA and has over 1,200 full time employees.

The company provides on-demand employee travel and entertainment management solutions worldwide, from self-booking, to itinerary management and online expense reporting.  

It has grown largely through acquisition and the rollup strategy seems to be working, as the company is a dominant player in the corporate travel space.  Some of the acquisitions include:

• 2002 Captura – hosted corporate expense management
• 2006 Outtask – provider of booking tool Cliqbook and expense application Vinnet
• 2007 Gelco Expense Management – auditing, payment processing and online expense management
• 2011 TripIt – Itinerary aggregation/management
• 2011 Global Expense – UK based end-to-end expense management

The company is also making some significant investments in online travel, including Indian site Cleartrip, in which they made a whopping $40m USD investment.  The theory here escapes me.

Concur recently made a $5 million investment in a leading airfare tracking and hotel rate tracking services provider, Yapta.  The strategic investment allows Concur to gain access to Yapta’s airfare price tracking and price assurance services. The company aims at making Yapta’s price tracking technology available to its TripIt Pro users and enable them to achieve their deserving airfare savings.

Concur is traded on the Nasdaq:CNQR.  The company’s stock traded today for $44.48 USD.  Like many other stocks in our industry, it is trading near its 52 week low of $42.80.  Its high was $58.19.

American Express is the largest single direct shareholder of Concur.  There are 111 other institutional shareholders, 

The company has a market cap of $2.4b USD on revenues of $331.82m.   The company is profitable and sustained that profitability throughout the economic crisis. Based on this valuation, I would say that CEO, Steve Singh is doing something right.

Check out their earnings call transcript:   http://seekingalpha.com/article/282463-concur-technologies-ceo-discusses-q3-2011-results-earnings-call-transcript?source=yahoo