Panasonic Corporation today announced that it has concluded a contract and finished the acquisition of a 51 percent share of Canada-based Quick Service Software Inc. (QSS), whose main products include back office software (BOSW) to manage information from the POS and aid in all aspects of managing a quick-service restaurant. QSS is a leading BOSW provider in the North American quick service restaurant industry, commanding an approximately 60 percent share in the Canadian market. The company offers competitive solutions with cloud-based software distribution and multilingual and multi-browser support, as well as having a strong software development capability to quickly address diverse needs of customers.
The food retail industry is one of the areas Panasonic is focusing on as the company aims to achieve sales of 2.5 trillion yen in the business-to-business solutions business in the fiscal year ending March 2019. Panasonic sees the North American food retail industry in particular as one of the promising, high-growth markets because of its sheer market size and high-growth potential in such areas as e-commerce. With this acquisition, Panasonic will pursue unconventional growth in its B-to-B operations by maximizing the synergy between QSS's back office solutions and Panasonic's products.
Recently, there is an increasing demand from customers for solutions to lower labor costs, employee turnover rate ,and costs incurred by waste and human error in operation, among others, as they are becoming critical issues in store management. More and more customers are turning to back office software as a leading tool for solving those issues associated with store management.
As part of the agreement, Quick Service Software will remain under the leadership of its current management team, continuing to provide the global market with system solutions supporting a highly open platform.