Debut of Telus spinoff TSX’s largest tech IPO
CEO says move to standalone firm will help investors see value relative to competitors
Telus Corp.’s digital consulting subsidiary is striking out on its own, hoping to gain recognition from investors as the realm of customer service is increasingly dominated by chat bots and social media management.
Telus International’s public offering on Wednesday marks a longawaited fork in the road for Telus Corp., which has tried to look beyond mobile phone and internet plans for new growth-making enterprise technology through Telus Health and Telus Agriculture.
“This transaction currency — our own publicly traded stock — is now something that Telus International can use to accelerate and amplify its own growth trajectory,” says chief executive Jeff Puritt.
Telus International no longer has to “to rely upon and draw away from Telus in order to fuel and support our growth,” he said, instead using the cash to fund everything from potential acquisitions to attracting and retaining talented staff.
For 15 years, Telus’s customer
service consultants had been quietly helping more and more companies and adding new services like artificial intelligence and chat bots, while under the telecom giant’s umbrella. Puritt says the move to a standalone business will better help investors see its value relative to competitors.
Puritt says the spinoff will also, hopefully, help shareholders of Telus Corp., which still holds about 67 per cent of the voting power in Telus International. (Telus Corp. is also the biggest customer of Telus International’s customer service offerings, followed by Alphabet Inc.’s Google and an unnamed “leading social media company.”)
Telus International describes itself as a customer experience company and has 600 clients, including Google, Uber, TikTok, PayPal and Zara.
Some examples of services sold by Telus International are helping a client move older systems to the cloud, creating a bot to help mobile phone users check their data plans, or finding and suspending fake social media accounts, Puritt says.
Telus International also counts consulting firms, IT companies and traditional call centres as competitors. The company, which operates in 20 countries and 50 languages, has said that some of its services can be provided between “offshore” and “nearshore” businesses.