Acxiom Corp. has acquired ChinaLoop, a business intelligence, customer relationship management and data management company based in Shanghai, China. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, although Charles Morgan, Acxiom company leader said that “we paid a very fair going rate for the business, [but] not a large amount of money.”
The Little Rock, AR-based data firm acquired ChinaLoop from founders Gabrielle Chou and Frederic Jouve. Chou and Jouve will stay remain a part of the company’s leadership team. ChinaLoop employs 62 workers.
Acxiom has maintained operations in Australia and New Zealand since 1999 and in Japan since 2001. ChinaLoop will expand Acxiom’s Asian footprint just as direct marketing is finding a toehold in China.
“They are building an industry of list people and service providers,” Morgan said. “It’s very much like our industry was in the 1960s. Computers are coming on stream really quickly. What may have taken us 40 years they’ll do in 10.”
According to Morgan, financial services, insurance, automotive and fast-moving consumer goods, including current customers Diageo, Financial Times, Nokia, Total, Citroen and Johnson & Johnson, will be among the first to use direct marketing to solicit Chinese consumers. ChinaLoop includes a database of 5 million names of Chinese consumers among its assets.
“We are certainly going to try to grow consumer data,” Morgan said. “It’s key to the success of our business in the US and in Europe and it will be the same in Asia.”
It doesn’t hurt that Chou, one of the founders of ChinaLoop, also created the Chinese Direct Marketing Association. Morgan described a recent visit to a Chinese DMA conference.
“We had two representatives of the [Chinese] government stand up and pronounce that direct marketing was a very important way for the Chinese economy to grow, and that the government will do everything in its powers to help direct marketing grow,” he said.
The government officials, who Morgan said were the equivalent of Commerce department members, also addressed privacy concerns. “They are going to adopt our opt-out model and not an opt-in model. That was very clear.”
Not that the sailing is going to be completely smooth. China is not known for having strong intellectual property protections, Morgan acknowledged, and name and address theft is possible. “Anything goes in the Wild, Wild East,” Morgan said.
But Acxiom is going into the Chinese market forewarned. “We know security is important in any culture,” Morgan said. “We will continue to build more and more secure systems. One way is through technology, another is through a business culture that helps support that, and the third way is security systems.”
