Strong revenue growth in ’09 takes Bango close to break even
Bango plc, the mobile web payments and analytics company, boosted revenue by 28% to £17.6m and narrowed pre-tax losses to £0.58m from £1.58m for the year ended 31 March.
The Cambridge-based company said end user spend increased 69% between the first and second half of the year.
CEO Ray Anderson said: "After a year in which we focused on improving our sales and marketing productivity, we have seen strong growth in revenues.
"We enter the new year close to break even on a monthly basis, with significantly lowered costs of sale and strong signs that mobile web usage is accelerating."
The AIM-listed company's share price gained over 6% in morning trading. It is now valued at around £11.5m.
Bango said it is now enabling the largest US content providers, in particular, to generate increased growth and provide better customer experiences by migrating from legacy Premium SMS suppliers to its web based systems.
Mr Anderson said the Company has a strong pipeline of prospects and increasing success from existing customers.
About 70% of Bango's revenue growth has come from customers that increased their use of the Bango payment service during the year. The remainder is from new customers signed up during the year.
After investing in self-service systems and the restructuring of the sales and marketing units, Bango has reduced the cost of customer acquisition. The costs of operating the largely automated services are stable, meaning Bango expects to derive economies of scale as absolute gross margins continue to grow ahead of costs.
End user revenue grew by 36% year on year and 69% half on half. It is now running at 2.7 times the level experienced in early June 2008. Absolute margin on end user spend was maintained whilst margin percentage reduced from 8.7% to 6.4% overall as a result of Bango's decision to lower transaction fees for larger content provider customers, resulting in significant increases in revenue from larger customers and the opportunity for substantial future growth.
