A small internal shareholder transaction has already valued the Walloon software player Odoo at €8.6 billion. That is more than €1 billion more than just five months ago. Founder and CEO Fabien Pinckaerts expects his company to be worth €10 billion by the end of this year.
In 2024, Odoo posted a turnover of 426 million euros. It is growing by around 40 to 50 per cent annually. The ERP software specialist is not making much profit, but that does not worry Pinckaers. On the contrary. “If we were making a lot of profit now, it would be a sign that we are not investing enough in our growth”.
I interviewed him for Channelnews in June 2024. This was the story:
He is 45 years old and founded ERP supplier Odoo in the summer of 2002, which today has 4,000 employees and a turnover of 370 million euros. Fabien Pinckaers from Walloon Brabant is a phenomenon. His company has grown by no less than 50% each year for the past four years, and he is convinced that Odoo is heading for a turnover of almost half a billion euros this year. And yet he is the epitome of modesty: ‘We only have 1% of the market.’
No tailor-made suit for Fabien Pinckaers, who was named manager of the year in 2020. He wears trainers, albeit with the Odoo name integrated into them. Anyone driving onto the company premises in Louvain-la-Neuve will be struck by the hundreds of white cars emblazoned with the Odoo name. And because Fabien Pinckaers likes to keep everything under his own control, the company also has its own garage. ‘The name Odoo doesn’t really mean anything. When we presented it to the press, we made up a story about it, but we just wanted a name with a few o’s in it.’ Odoo currently has 1,200 vacancies and, remarkably, every developer who is recruited immediately receives 10,000 euros in his or her bank account, with no strings attached. ‘Otherwise, I’d have to pay a headhunter,’ says Pinckaers. Around 1,500 people work in Belgium, about half of whom have been with the company for less than 18 months. It is also a remarkably young crowd. Other sites are located in San Francisco, Italy, Mexico and Dubai. He himself recently spent a year living in the West Indies. Another striking figure: Belgium accounts for barely 4 per cent of turnover: ‘99% of Belgian SMEs have not yet been digitised.’
Odoo grew without acquisitions because ‘that only distracts you and then you end up with managers you don’t want.’ Fabien Pinckaers does not like managers, that much is clear. The teams are led by team leaders who are elected by the department. No meetings unless absolutely necessary, no reporting, ‘all a waste of time.’ Odoo does have over 4,500 partners and organises around 400 events per year, attended by an average of 300 guests.
Fabien Pinckaers hardly develops any software himself anymore, ‘unless it’s for fun’. But he remains a workaholic, even though he now takes five days’ holiday a year. 80% of his offering still consists of open source solutions, but just under ten years ago, Odoo switched to a paid option. ‘Inexpensive and simple’ remains the credo.
