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Vendor lineage

TIVIT

A professional tennis player, a nightclub, and a company built by merging two others somebody already owned.

TIVIT did not start in a garage. It was assembled. In 2005 Votorantim Novos Negócios merged two companies from its own portfolio - Optiglobe, bought in 2002, and Proceda, bought about eight months earlier - and named the result TIVIT. It arrived with roughly two thousand staff and over two hundred clients including Petrobras, Xerox and White Martins. The company's own timeline dates the brand to 2004; contemporaneous press coverage of the merger is dated August 2005, and both are recorded here.

The person behind it had an unusual previous career. Luiz Mattar spent ten years as a professional tennis player before going into business. His first venture as an investor was a combined brewery and nightclub. Shortly after, with four partners and R$150,000, he started Telefutura - a call centre and business process outsourcing company - which sold 20% to Votorantim Novos Negócios in 2001, a transaction that mattered less for the money than for the credibility it bought with financial-sector clients.

The idea Mattar kept pressing was a one stop shop: a customer able to buy every kind of IT service from a single supplier rather than assembling one from many. Votorantim eventually concluded it owned the pieces to build that, and did - which is why TIVIT exists as a merger rather than a founding. Telefutura itself was folded in during 2007.

The listing is a detail worth keeping. TIVIT went public on BM&FBovespa's Novo Mercado in September 2009 at R$15 a share, raising over R$660M, after two earlier attempts had been abandoned because of market conditions. At the time it was the only IT services company listed on the Brazilian exchange - the other technology listings were hardware makers like Positivo, Itautec and Bematech, or software, like Totvs. A services business is harder to explain to public markets than a factory, and for a while nobody else tried.

It did not stay listed long. In 2010 Apax Partners bought control, paying a premium of twenty to thirty per cent over a market capitalisation of about R$1.47B, and it was Apax's first investment in Brazil. Under that ownership the company expanded across the region, acquiring Synapsis in 2014 and reaching ten Latin American countries.

What followed is the ordinary arc of a services business in this period: a cloud platform in 2016, a digital solutions arm, an innovation unit, a cybersecurity practice that reported around ninety per cent growth in 2023, a separation of the data centre business under the Takoda name, and an acquisition by the Italian group Almaviva.

Read against the Stefanini entry, the two are opposite constructions of the same thing. Stefanini began with one man teaching classes in a spare room and grew outward for decades. TIVIT began fully formed, with two thousand employees and a client list, because a holding company decided the market wanted something and merged its way to it. Both are large Brazilian technology services firms; neither could have been built the other's way. One needed patience and one needed capital, and the interesting question is which model travels better - Stefanini went abroad on its own account, while TIVIT's regional expansion arrived with private equity attached.

The timeline

  1. One client, and then the problem with one client

    Telefutura's first customer was iG, the free internet provider, which was growing faster than it had planned to and needed people to answer telephones. By the end of the first year around ninety-five per cent of revenue came from a single sector - which is the position every young services company reaches and the one that decides whether it becomes a business or a supplier.

  2. Sold without the data centres

    Takoda, the spin-off holding the data centre operation, was excluded from the Almaviva transaction and put up for sale separately. A company assembled in 2005 around Optiglobe - a data centre business - changed hands twenty years later with the data centres carved out of the deal. What the buyer wanted was the services layer that had been built on top of them.

  3. Not an entry, a doubling down

    The acquirer was already there. Almaviva's Brazilian operation was its largest outside Italy before the deal - some thirty-seven thousand people and R$1.7 billion of revenue - so this is a foreign group that had already made its bet on the country and was increasing it, rather than one arriving.

Flagship products and solutions

  • Cloud and infrastructure managementRunning the platforms rather than owning the buildings, which is the distinction the Takoda separation made structural.
  • CybersecurityA distinct business unit, and the fastest-growing part of the portfolio in recent years - the same demand curve every services firm in this region has ridden.
  • SAP and application servicesImplementing and running the enterprise systems Brazilian corporations depend on, which is unglamorous, sticky and the reason customers stay a decade.
  • Business process outsourcingThe Telefutura inheritance: running processes on a client's behalf, still present in the portfolio two decades after it was the whole company.

Key innovations

  • Assembled to a specificationMost companies discover what they are. This one was designed: a holding company decided the market wanted a single supplier for everything technical, checked which of its own assets could be combined into that, and merged them. It is corporate strategy executed as a founding, and it produced a company that had scale before it had a history.
  • Selling the layer rather than the floorSeparating the data centres from the services and selling them apart is a statement about where the value sits. Buildings full of racks are an asset with a known price and a capital cost; the practices running on them are harder to value and harder to replace. The market answered that question by buying one and leaving the other on the shelf.
  • Private equity as the vehicle for regional expansionThe entry above notes that the regional expansion arrived with private equity attached. That is the trade: capital and acquisition discipline in exchange for a clock. Fifteen years under one owner is long for that model, and the several abandoned attempts to sell suggest the exit was harder to find than the entry was.

Main markets

Large Brazilian and Latin American enterprises - financial services above all, plus industry, retail and public sector - across ten countries, at around R$2.1 billion of revenue.

It competes with Stefanini and the other regional services firms, with the global integrators, and increasingly with the cloud providers themselves, whose managed offerings remove work that used to be outsourced.

Analyst standing

  • The financial picture reported around the sale is worth stating plainly: revenue of roughly R$2.1 billion in 2024, and a 2023 profit of R$5.7 million that reversed a R$47.2 million loss the year before. Those are thin margins on substantial revenue, which is the ordinary condition of labour-based services and the reason consolidation keeps happening.
  • The purchase price was not disclosed, and the 2010 figure is itself reported two ways - R$874 million in one account and a billion dollars in another. Where a company has changed hands three times and the numbers do not reconcile across sources, the honest position is to report the range and note that nobody outside the transactions can settle it.
TIVIT (Wikipédia) ↗
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