Deputy Editor of International Rental News Lewis Tyler speaks to Andris Pavlovs, co-founder and chairman of the board of Storent Group, about the company’s recent funding round, its growth strategy, and the Baltic rental market.
IRN’s Lewis Tyler speaks to Andris Pavlovs, co-founder and chairman of the board of Storent Group, about the company’s recent funding round, its growth strategy, and the Baltic rental market.
Latvian rental company Storent Holdings recently finalised a bond offering of €4.5 million, with the final amount being oversubscribed and totalling €7.2 million from 1325 unique investors.
IRN: You recently held two bond offerings, what do you plan to use the bonds for?
Andris Pavlovs: As our ownership structure changed in December 2022, Storent had taken course to major growth in near future. We used the bonds to refinance the previous bonds and debts to previous owners of our company.
With those obstacles out of the way we can invest in our growth by expanding our fleet and number of rental depots. This will help us do everything we planned and to increase the efficiency of our company.
IRN: Will you hold further bonds in the future?
We are extremely happy to have such a demand for our bonds that we not only reached our target but had oversubscription. The best surprise was the activity of retail investors. At the moment the amount we raised is enough to grow at the pace we want to, but we don’t exclude the possibility to issue more if we see a great opportunity ahead.
IRN: What is the company’s strategy for growth?
We aim to gain a bigger share of business in the Baltic region with a special focus on increasing our share in Estonia. In the Nordic countries, we see ourselves stronger as a niche player in specific product groups.
In addition to this, we aim to increase our efficiency in every part of the company’s work by fully implementing digitalization in the company. By the end of 2023 we plan to finish the implementation of a new ERP system called IRMS (Intelligent Rental Management Systems) that supports rental and all related operations, with the biggest focus on process automatisation and the best possible user experience.
The new ERP system is integrated with many other IT technology products like outer credit rating system, GPS tracking, transport management system, CRM, and customer online portal and synchronized with financial accounting system.
The cloud-based IRMS product ensures flexible business analytic tools that allow tracking of rental operation KPIs and other important business measurements for the purpose of making business decisions for tomorrow based on today’s data without any delay.
We also plan to strengthen our cooperation with PreferRent. Working on this platform increases our work efficiency greatly, so it is an important tool in our strategy.