Cegid Bills €85 Million in Portugal in Its First Full Year After Buying PHC — Lyon-Based Group's Iberian Bet Now Anchors a 700-Person Lisbon Operation Targeting 10% Growth in 2026

The Cegid Group, the Lyon-headquartered enterprise-software publisher that bought Portuguese ERP house PHC Business Software in January 2025, closed its first full year inside the Portuguese market with revenue of €85 million and a forecast 10% increase for 2026. The figures, disclosed Monday by ECO, frame the deal as the most consequential foreign technology acquisition in Lisbon since Cegid's 2022 absorption of Grupo Primavera in Braga, and they put a number on what the French group expects from a now-consolidated Iberian footprint.

The Numbers Behind the Year

Cegid's global turnover reached €1.07 billion in 2025, up 10.7% on 2024. Portugal accounted for roughly 8% of that total — €85 million. The group employs 700 people in Portugal, serves 60,000 corporate customers across Portugal, Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde, and counts 300,000 end-users on its products. The partner channel adds another 580 firms and 5,500 professionals who resell or implement Cegid software locally.

The 10% growth target for 2026 is roughly in line with the group's global trajectory and depends on cross-selling Cegid's wider portfolio — point-of-sale, retail, talent — into the PHC and Primavera installed base.

The PHC Deal, Recapped

Cegid announced the PHC acquisition on 21 January 2025 and completed the legal closing during the same year. Financial terms were never published; advisers Cuatrecasas and Abreu Advogados ran the Portuguese legs of the transaction. PHC, founded in 1989, brought a 30-year client base of Portuguese SMEs running ERP, payroll and CRM modules, plus the PHC CS stack that competes head-on with Primavera and SAGE in the mid-market. Cegid management told ECO the integration is now described internally as "100% complete", with HR systems, vacation policies and parental-leave terms harmonised under a single Portuguese employment template earlier in March.

2026: AI as Plan A

General Manager for Portugal and Portuguese-speaking Africa Paulo Carvalho, appointed in October 2025, told ECO that artificial intelligence is the company's "plan A without deviations". The deliverable is what Cegid calls "smart actions" — domain-specific AI agents embedded inside HR, logistics, financial and accounting workflows. Carvalho says the company has built "dozens, hundreds" of such agents and that the explicit goal is "real AI impact, particularly for Portuguese SMEs", the customer segment Lisbon and Brussels both count on for productivity gains.

Hiring will continue, but at a slower pace than 2024–2025. The 700-person headcount is now described as the floor for 2026, with new positions concentrated in AI engineering and customer-success roles tied to the agent rollout.

Why It Matters for the Lisbon Tech Map

The integration of PHC and Primavera under a single French parent quietly removes two of Portugal's largest independent ERP brands from the standalone column of the country's tech directory. It also creates the country's largest enterprise-software employer outside of OutSystems and Critical Software. Carvalho indicated Cegid remains "attentive" to further Portuguese acquisitions, though near-term focus is internal consolidation. For competitors — SAGE, Microsoft Dynamics partners, the smaller Portuguese ERP houses — the read is that the consolidation cycle in Iberian business software is now firmly French-led.

Sources: ECO ("Grupo Cegid fatura 85 milhões em Portugal em ano de compra da PHC", 27 April 2026); ECO archive on the January 2025 PHC acquisition; Jornal de Negócios on Cegid's wider Iberian M&A pipeline; ECO on Cegid's harmonised vacation and parental-leave policies, 20 March 2026.

The Portugal Brief’s reporting on getting a NIF as a new arrival in Portugal sits alongside this piece.