Sinch had yet another profitable quarter. But the bigger news was CEO Laurinda Pang announcing that she intends to step down once a successor is appointed, no later than the end of this year.

So, instead of discussing Sinch’s quarterly results, I want to talk about Laurinda’s tenure.

“Executives,” said Peter Drucker, “are forever bailing out the past.”  What he meant was that even as executives invest for the future, they are often paying for decisions made before them, including decisions that may have made sense at the time. In Laurinda’s case, that past came with a $4.9B bill.

Between Wavy, SAP Digital Interconnect, Inteliquent, MessageMedia, Pathwire, and several smaller deals, Sinch had acquired more than ten companies as it tried to build itself into a global communications platform. Some of those acquisitions were good assets. Some were expensive assets. Some were probably both. But acquisitions are easy to announce and hard to integrate.

Sinch needed to take businesses that were bought at different times, for different reasons, with different products, different cultures, different sales motions, and different customer expectations, and make them feel like one company. Layer on the debt Sinch took on to finance those acquisitions, and the job gets even harder. Rather than buying a single property, Sinch bought an entire subdivision, realized the roads, pipes, and wiring did not all connect, and then asked Laurinda to make it feel like one address.

That was the leviathan Laurinda inherited. That was the job.

Just the Numbers

Sinch gave up some scale, improved the quality of the business, and used cash to reduce the share count.

The raw numbers on Net Operating Profit, Income, and EPS are all impressive. However, the buyback is the most aggressive number in the table. Retiring roughly 10% of the shares means every remaining shareholder owns a larger piece of the company. 

The company became more impressive in the ways that show up in earnings. Laurinda leaves behind a more profitable Sinch. That is the numbers story.

Sidebar: The MessageMedia Acquisition

The MessageMedia acquisition deserves its own sidebar because it says a lot about the market Sinch was operating in at the time.

I was an advisor to one of the other bidders, and the math never added up for me. There was a good business inside MessageMedia, especially SimpleTexting. But it felt like SimpleTexting was propping up too much of the growth story, while the broader product and GTM investment was subpar for the price being paid.

Back then, I estimated that Sinch overpaid for MessageMedia by at least half a billion dollars. 

This is not a knock on the people inside MessageMedia. It is a comment on the deal and props to MessageMedia’s bankers who created impressive deal heat. 

This was the period when everyone was trying to understand Twilio, and a lot of companies were trying to buy their way into a similar story. Twilio had bought Zipwhip, and everyone was convinced that it was because it wanted to get into the SMB market. When in fact, Twilio was buying a carrier-interconnect asset. Sinch, like much of the investor community, misread the signal.

In Q4 2024, Sinch recorded a non-cash goodwill impairment of SEK 6,000 million (approximately $650 million USD), primarily attributed to the MessageMedia acquisition.

And Then There Was the Culture

I interviewed Laurinda on stage at ConnectMobile in 2023. What struck me was how she could make the complex simple without making it seem easy.

A lot of executives can make a complicated business sound simple for twenty minutes on a stage. That is not the same thing as explaining it clearly. CPaaS is messy. Messaging, voice, email, verification, carrier relationships, enterprise customers, regulatory pressure, developer expectations, AI, and regional differences all sit on top of each other. Then add acquisitions, legacy systems, overlapping products, different cultures, and different customer promises.

That is a hard business to explain because it is a hard business to run.

Laurinda did not hide behind the usual words. She kept coming back to the customer. Not customer focus as a slogan. Customer focus as a way to decide what matters. The customer does not care which acquisition owns which product. The customer does not care which backend system is old. The customer does not care how hard the integration roadmap is. The customer cares whether the thing works.

That sounds obvious until you spend time around companies built through acquisitions. Inside those companies, the org chart can start to become the product. Internal politics can become the roadmap. Teams defend what they built. Business units protect their own story. Everyone agrees on integration until integration means their product, their budget, or their way of working has to change.

From what I gather from other Sinchers, Laurinda is not a loud leader, but a clear one. She can sit inside the complexity without letting it become the explanation. She can talk about the hard parts without making them sound theatrical. And she can bring the conversation back to the customer, which is where it belongs.

I do not want to overstate it. Sinch is still not simple. It may never be simple. This is a global communications business operating across channels, geographies, customer types, and regulatory environments. But there is a difference between necessary complexity and self-inflicted complexity. Laurinda seems to have spent her three years at Sinch reducing the second kind.

That is harder than it sounds. It means telling people no. It means deciding which products deserve investment and which ones do not. It means making teams that were acquired for their independence operate as part of something bigger. It means taking businesses that had their own stories and pushing them into one story customers can understand. It means criss-crossing the globe, confronting conflict, and cajoling people who were used to operating separately into moving in the same direction.

Finally—The Solitary Zip Code

Even in the C-suite, the CEO is a solitary zip code, one with many windows and little privacy.

Employees, customers, investors, the board, and the market all have an opinion about what a CEO should do. And when a CEO vacates, everyone has a theory as to why. 

I could ask Laurinda, but I won’t. I’m more interested in what she does next.