Amber Road announces initial public offering

Cloud-based global trade management technology provider Amber Road (formerly known as Management Dynamics) announced the pricing of its initial public offering (IPO) of 7,391,565 shares of its common stock at $13 per share, with 4,782,870 shares being offered by the company and 2,608,695 shares offered by selling stockholders.

Based in East Rutherford, New Jersey, Amber Road’s global trade management platform automates international import and export processes for large companies like Walmart, General Electric, Sherwin Williams and Tyco International.

In 2013, Amber Road processed more than 600 million transactions and supply chain messages on its cloud-based trading network and made more than 13 million regulatory updates to its Global Knowledge repository of trade regulations, according to a company prospectus filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Global Knowledge is described in the prospectus as a vast library of regulations and other content that Amber Road transforms into a proprietary knowledgebase that enables its customers to automate GTM functions across 125 countries.

In an interview with LM, Amber Road’s Founder and CEO Jim Preuninger said going public has been part of the company’s plan for a number of years.

“We are really excited about the global trade management space,” he noted. “It is a huge market opportunity, and we have invested a lot of time and energy to put ourselves into a position to be a leader in a market that is growing and exciting. Being a public company establishes that leadership position for everyone.” 

While the IPO is clearly a milestone in the company’s history, Preuninger said that post-IPO things will basically have a “business as usual” theme, as Amber Road has been operating like a public company to a large degree for the past several years, with a complete senior management team that has done business in a very professional manner and reported internally with the kind of internal discipline that most public companies have.

On the customer side, Preuninger said the IPO has been well received.

“We have talked to a lot of our customers about it, and many of them are very supportive of this process and participated in our prospectus and consented to letting us use their name[s] and logos and were active in the development of case studies where we could profile our impact to their business. That was very helpful.”

Looking ahead, Preuninger said the primary focus for Amber Road as a company is to continue to serve its customers and to present itself to new prospects, adding that GTM is a good market for the company right now.

Some of the key growth areas identified by Amber Road in its prospectus include:
-investing in sales as complement to its investment in infrastructure by hiring new sales directors and supporting personnel, particularly for territories outside of the United States, including China;
-investing in marketing to maintain its marketing focus on lead generation, in particular by running more marketing programs to jump-start new territories;
-further international expansion outside of the U.S. and regions within China and Europe, with significant opportunities in Brazil, Russia, and China
-expanding its solutions by continuing to leverage its solution team to expand the depth and breadth of its solution in response to customer requests and the evolving nature of global trade; and
-execute strategic acquisitions, which it said represents an opportunity for the company to augment its solution capabilities and sales team

Cloud-based global trade management, said Preuninger, has reached the C-level within many companies, with many companies coming to them with qualifying projects and solving problems in their business that are fairly substantial.

“Customers are coming to us not wanting to automate something small, instead they want to automate their entire global supply chain,” he said. “It is not about imports and exports in the U.S. or in Germany. It is much more about global deployments. Getting control of the global supply chain is key and having the visibility to real time information and being able to monitor and control inventories in the supply chain and having the confidence things will work as planned, compress cycle time, be more efficient, and take costs out, and participate in things like free trade agreements are all things that are important for our customers.”