Lumine Group Expands Position in Communications & Media Vertical with Acquisition of MDS Global

TORONTO, July 17, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE)—Lumine Group (“Lumine”) today announced that it has completed its twelfth acquisition in the Communications and Media vertical with the acquisition of MDS Global Ltd. (“MDS Global”), a provider of revenue management, business assurance, and analytics software to telecommunications service providers.

Founded in 1987 as part of Martin Dawes Telecommunications Ltd. (MDT), a pioneering Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) in the UK, MDS Global started as an in-house billing system. When MDT was sold to BT Cellnet in 1999, MDS Global was spun-out as a stand-alone business.

“We have had a number of approaches to purchase MDS Global over the years but never found the right acquirer for this business. We have been talking with Lumine regularly since 2015 and we are now convinced they are the best home for MDS Global in terms of financial backing, stability, and commitment to the communications vertical globally. In addition, given their past eleven acquisitions in this space, there is now a strong customer base for us to access which can help further accelerate our business internationally,” said Martin Dawes, Founder and Principal Shareholder of MDS Global. “We also liked their practice of ‘buy and hold forever,’ as well as their dedication to letting acquired companies run autonomously, maintaining our corporate identity, and enhancing the brand we have worked so hard to build over 3 decades in the market.”

“We are very excited by this acquisition. We are particularly excited that Lumine are professional software people and can help us to grow the performance of our business in every area. This enables us to scale more rapidly beyond our historical base in the UK and Europe to address the needs of new disruptive MVNO’s, IoT providers, and next-generation B2B operators across the globe,” said Gary Bunney, who remains CEO of MDS Global.

MDS Global solutions are deployed on premise and in the cloud, and flagship long-term customers include British Telecom, Telefonica O2, eir, ACN Europe, Telia, Post Office UK, TalkTalk and ID Mobile.

“We are excited to bring a market-leading billing business into our portfolio, in order to complement our existing companies and provide further mission-critical software capabilities to our ecosystem,” said David Nyland, President, Lumine Group. “We are particularly impressed with how MDS Global’s managed services capabilities evolved over years, into being the trusted billing platform for major Tier 1 operators. We look forward to assisting MDS Global in growing their cloud-based as-a-service billing offering, which enables disruptive operators to launch customer configurable services and IoT monetization.”

(Note: At the time of the acquisition, Lumine Group was known as Volaris Group Communications & Media. Changes have been made in this press release to replace “Volaris Group Communications & Media” with “Lumine Group”.)

Contact Information

Erini Andriopoulos, erini.andriopoulos@luminegroup.com