Podcast: Why KORE Selected the SPAC Process

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Transcript

KORE decided to go public utilizing the SPAC model, because of the very high-quality partner who found us, who called Abry, our a private equity company. And that, of course, is Cerberus, the sponsor, the SPAC itself is CTAC, the Cerberus Telecommunications Acquisition Corporation. If I go back in time, to May 2018, is the first time our board discussed going public as a viable strategic alternative for KORE. And indeed, that because it is short form process it might be a time-efficient way to get there. We by no means were guaranteed to go that direction. In fact, we may not have gone in that direction, if again, if Cerberus hadn't called because we'd had a few conversations with a few SPACs over the last year or so. But nothing serious. And we really weren't, you know, going to go with anything less than a world class, highly-credible sponsor. And that's what we found in CTAC. And even more impressive for me was the quality of the advisory group, that the CEO of CTAC, Tim Donahue has been CEO of Nextel and before that McCaw Cellular and before that with AT&T, he was an executive there. And so, you know, he's sort of forgotten more about telecommunications and the industry then, then I've learned these last few years, and then we looked at the other advisors guys like Shaygan Kheradpir who built the network at Verizon and Timothy Kasbe and we felt like these advisors, their knowledge in the space, their connectivity in the space, they were really going to help us network and connect and take the advantages we thought about of going public, which of course were to deliver massively from effectively nine, nine a half turns of EBITDA in leverage down to about 1.7 as our performance is in the 1.7 times EBITDA of that is what is the performances in our public investment deck. So we wanted to do it for those reasons to give us the financial flexibility to accelerate shareholder value creation through m&a to have a public currency, to execute to our m&a agenda to get much more visibility. We've been hard at work for the last three plus years, repositioning core for the decade of IoT ahead, and nobody really knew our story. So those were the reasons we thought we were going to go public. And then when we saw the really special board of advisors and the credible sponsor in Cerberus, we thought a shorter form process would be efficient, virtual largely with the pandemic on you know, roadshows are being done on Zoom calls. We just thought it was a really great way to go and we expect to be done here in Q3 of 2021.