IRELAND. Cardinal Capital Group, Ireland’s largest provider of private equity investment to SMEs, has made a “significant investment” in Travelwin Group. The latter owns Sim Local, a leading worldwide pre-paid SIM card provider in travel locations.
Ireland-headquartered Sim Local operates its own shops, including five at Heathrow and one soon to open at Brussels Airport, airport retail relationships with WHSmith and InMotion and a network of airport-based vending machines.
Sim Local – which currently has a 54-country network – connected over 700,000 travellers with local SIM cards in 2019 via 300 contracted sales points across Europe and the US.
Growth in this area, stunted during the pandemic, is expected to expand rapidly over the next 12 months with the widescale reopening of international travel.
Through Sim Local’s proprietary eSim enabling software, it is well-positioned to benefit from the oncoming transition to eSim technology. This will see physical SIM cards replaced by eSim profiles embedded within the phone.
This new technology will allow customers to have multiple plans on one phone and switch between them seamlessly. It is expected to lead to exponential growth in the sale of local SIM profiles among the 1.4 billion people who travel internationally each year (pre-pandemic numbers), allowing them to avoid expensive roaming charges.
Sim Local was founded in 2011 by CEO Killian Whelan, and has grown with support from Enterprise Ireland. Whelan said: “This investment by Cardinal Capital along with their expertise in scaling companies will help Sim Local to take advantage of what is a tremendous growth opportunity in the international pre-paid SIM card and eSim markets.”
Cardinal Capital Managing Director of Private Equity Mike Maloney said: “Before COVID Sim Local was growing very quickly in the pre-paid SIM card market. As the world comes out of lockdown and international travel opens up we are delighted to invest behind Killian and his management team to help the business scale internationally.”
He added: “We particularly look forward to helping Sim Local take advantage of the exceptional opportunity accompanying the widescale adoption of eSim technology.”
Whelan added: “Mike’s experience successfully scaling Payzone to become Ireland’s leading point-of-sale and electronic-payments company should prove invaluable to Sim Local as we chart a similar trajectory.”
To support the new investment, Maloney and Cardinal Capital Group Director Daragh Lane will join the Travelwin board.
