The Smartway group of companies acquired the business travel agency ATH – Kommersant

Business travel agency Smartway (51% of the 1C IT holding) acquired the ATH business travel agency, a service representative told Kommersant. The total amount of the transaction will be from $2 million to $5 million, the final figure depends on the growth of the client base and turnover in the direction of MICE (services for organizing business travel, visa processing and organizing events), the company specified. The ATH agency will continue to develop under its own brand, and there are no plans to change the management team, Smartway says.

“ATH has been the exclusive representative of AMEX, the world’s largest travel and corporate expense management company, for the past 11 years,” says Maxim Yaremko, founder and CEO of Smartway. Thus, thanks to the deal, Smartway will be able to fully enter a new segment for itself in order to work with clients who need personalized offline service and organization of events, the company’s CEO notes.

According to SPARK-Interfax, another 44.10% of Smartway is owned by the company’s CEO Yaremko Maxim Olegovich, the remaining 4.9% belongs to Kolyasnikov Alexander Vladimirovich. The revenue of Smartway LLC at the end of 2022 amounted to 895 million rubles, net profit – 466 million rubles. A year earlier, the LLC’s revenue was at the level of 411 million rubles. with a net profit of 156 million rubles.

According to SPARK-Interfax, the founders of AT&E JSC are not registered in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities. The last owner of the company listed in SPARK-Interfax, according to 2016 data, is the British ATH BTS Limited. The company, however, went into liquidation in 2013, according to UK registry data. The last director of ATH BTS Limited is Mikhail Kolesnikov. JSC also has a 99.9% stake in Glavkomandirovka LLC, 49% in Altivist LLC, and another 49% in BiTiEm LLC. JSC revenue in 2022 amounted to 131 million rubles, net profit – 425 thousand rubles. A year earlier, the joint-stock company’s revenue was at the level of 389 million rubles. with a net loss of 25 million rubles.

The desire of Russian business to find new partners abroad and develop their branches in other countries led to restore the intensity of foreign business trips. Thus, in January-April 2023, the demand of business tourists for flights abroad increased by 87% year-on-year, follows from Aeroclub data. The share of trips abroad increased in the total structure of business trips over the year from 11% to 15%.

Anastasia Vyalikova, senior consultant at the Kontakt InterSearch Russia recruiting center, linked this trend with the building of new international connections between companies: “Many of them are looking for suppliers after the departure of some Western players, they open foreign branches, and in Russia, in turn, players from other countries begin to work” .

In Russia, the business tourism market is still diversifying both due to the development of domestic flights and due to the transformation of international cooperation – the development of the eastern direction, explains NTI expert on technology markets, project coordinator of the North-West Center for Strategic Research, Elizaveta Godunova : “The relevance of long-distance public and business aviation travel remains high.”

For small and medium-sized businesses in the field of business tourism, according to her, it is difficult to assume a rapid development at the moment, as large companies in the market will aim to take their market share and not impede development.

Julia Yurasova