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- Tecnoacquisti.com
- PrestaShop Blog and Ecommerce Tutorial
Mail Boxes Etc is a network of sales centers specialized in packaging, logistics, shipping, and office products that has recently acquired the French company PrestaShop SA. MBE was founded in San Diego, California in 1980, and in 1993 the brand was brought to Italy by the Fiorelli family, and in 2009 Paolo Fiorelli acquired MBE Worldwide and all rights to use the brand worldwide except in the United States, Canada, and India, where the stores remain under UPS control.
In 2017, PostNet and AlphaGrapics, American franchising companies active in printing, graphics, and shipping, were acquired. By 2019, there were more than 500 centers in Italy, and the global network counts about 1600 MBE centers. With the PostNet and AlphaGrapics brands, the network rises to 2600 stores in 52 countries with over 10,000 employees and a revenue of 918 million euros. Part of the MBE network is managed directly, but many stores are franchises.
Oaktree Capital Management, a U.S. company specializing in alternative investment strategies, has acquired 40% of the shares of MBE Worldwide, although the Fiorelli family remains the majority shareholder.
PrestaShop remains Open Source.
The CMS entirely designed for the development of ecommerce is open source and will remain so. Recent changes have involved the development of PrestaShop with the creation of a foundation that will take care of the development of the free project. From version 8 of PrestaShop, there will be two versions of the CMS: one completely Open Source with no connection to the developer PrestaShop SA and its services such as Addons, and a Corporate version managed directly by PrestaShop SA. The change occurred before the acquisition by MBE and resolves an anomaly. The creation of a foundation could potentially attract various developers and allow for significant growth of the project.
The purchase of PrestaShop SA
Both PrestaShop SA and MBE are focused on the SME sector. PrestaShop has over 300,000 e-commerce sites worldwide developed with the CMS, which is estimated to have generated around 22 billion euros in sales in 2020, while the revenue of PrestaShop SA stands at over 20 million euros.
“PrestaShop and its team of talents will represent a great added value for MBE. Combining ‘atoms and bits’ will allow us to further differentiate our market positioning, thus enabling MBE to become one of the most important global platforms for e-commerce and logistics for businesses.”
[Paolo Fiorelli, President and CEO of MBE Worldwide]
The acquisition of PrestaShop SA has good prospects, certainly a franchise network is the furthest thing from the current era, a dinosaur from the atomic age. MBE is not new to attempting to offer proprietary ecommerce solutions to its customers through its retail outlets, solutions that did not take off partly because they were outdated and partly due to the lack of preparation of its commercial affiliates. With the acquisition of PrestaShop SA, MBE certainly gains the expertise that in the past prevented it from emerging in the sector. In light of the Italian digital divide and European bureaucracy, it could still be a great growth opportunity and a response to the competition from SaaS platforms like Shopify in the micro-enterprise sector, the branch that has allowed PrestaShop to compete today in the segment that was occupied by Magento. Everything will depend on the degree of freedom granted to the community and the agencies that revolve around the corporate project of the CMS.
Certainly, as happened with Mozilla Foundation before the acquisition by AOL of Netscape, at the end of the browser wars, open source secures the project from market perspectives, even when the old meets the new.
Author: Loris Modena
SENIOR DEVELOPER
Per Ind Loris Modena, owner of Arte e Informatica, started working in the IT sector in 1989 as a system administrator responsible for the maintenance and installation of computer systems. He began programming for the web in 1997, focusing on CGI programming in PERL and later transitioning to programming in PHP and JavaScript. During this time, he became familiar with the Open Source world and the management of Linux servers.