Final Results
Bango PLC
18 May 2006
18 May 2006
BANGO PLC
('Bango' or the 'Company')
Preliminary Results for year ending 31 March 2006
Bango has developed and deployed an open, global infrastructure platform that
enables content providers to market, sell and deliver their products and
services directly to mobile phone users on all mobile networks using the
Internet.
Financial Highlights (Comparative data for FYE 31 March '05)
• Revenues grew 121% to £7.53m (£3.41m).
• Gross profit grew 125% to £2.19m (£0.97m).
• Operating expenses increased by 92% to £3.72m (£1.93m) due to expansion
into new territories, product development and increased marketing spend.
• Pre-tax losses of £1.3m (£0.9m) down to 17.7% of revenue (26.9%).
• UK operation profitable and cash generative.
• Successful IPO in June 2005 raising £6.21m (net of expenses) to support
growth plans.
Operational Highlights
• Content access (end user spend) fees more than doubled to £6.47m (£2.90m)
• Content provider (package) fees more than trebled to £1.00m (£0.31m)
• Customer base grown significantly to include: Channel 4, Sony BMG, The
Sun and EMI.
• Number of content providers spending over £5,000/yr increased by 250%
since March 05.
• Expansion successfully begun into US, Spain and Germany.
• Number of partners increased from 3 to 14 leading to increased sales
productivity.
• Agreements signed with four mobile network operators: Orange, O2,
Proximus and Cingular Wireless. Additional agreement with Telefonica signed
post year end.
Ray Anderson, Chief Executive Officer of Bango, commented: 'Last year was an
excellent year in the development of Bango. We have established a strong and
scalable business with a unique industry position. Our growth is accelerating
and the market, although at an early stage, continues to develop in our favour.
'In the UK we continue to see strong growth in both content provider sign ups
and end user spend. In other territories, including the US, we are also seeing
strong growth in content provider sign ups. However, we have experienced longer
than expected lead times between a new content provider signing up and its
marketing activity that drives end user spend. Accordingly we are lowering our
expectations of the growth in end user spend outside the UK for the current
financial year.
'We are in a strong financial position to capitalize on our growth opportunities
and, working with mobile operators, content providers and brands, other
commercial partners and investors, we look forward to continuing success in the
coming years.'
Contact Details:
Bango plc ICIS Limited - Financial PR Panmure Gordon & Co
Tel. +44 1223 472777 Tel. +44 20 7651 8688 Tel. +44 20 7459 3600
Ray Anderson, CEO Tom Moriarty Aubrey Powell
Peter Saxton, CFO Caroline Evans-Jones Stuart Gledhill
About Bango
Bango (AIM: BGO) has developed and deployed an open, global infrastructure
platform that enables content providers to market, sell and deliver their
products and services directly to mobile phone users on all mobile networks
using the mobile Internet. This 'direct-to-consumer' approach operates alongside
the mobile operator's mobile portal. Leading mobile operators including Cingular
Wireless, Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica and O2 work with Bango to accelerate the
growth of their direct-to-consumer business.
The Bango platform has given mobile phone subscribers around the world greater
access to third-party content. Leading content brands are now using Bango's
services to engage with their existing and potential mobile customers directly -
irrespective of mobile operator. For further information, go to www.bango.com.
Chairman's Statement
The board is delighted to report excellent progress in all areas of the business
resulting in significant growth, increasing numbers of Bango customers supplying
increasing amounts of content to end users and expansion into new territories.
When Bango came to market in June 2005, three months into the financial year of
this report, we had set ourselves ambitious goals: to further invest in our
unique Bango products and technology, and to establish a local presence in three
new key markets: the USA, Spain and Germany. We now have offices and sales teams
established in all three territories, alongside our successful UK presence, and
we have started to see significant customer wins in these territories as a
result.
Compared to the previous financial year, we are pleased to report revenue growth
of 121% to £7.53 million and gross margin growth of 125% to £2.19 million,
driven largely by our established UK business. Additional content provider
sign-ups in other territories are accelerating fast and this bodes well for the
coming year and beyond.
Bango also derives revenue from end user spend on content. Having witnessed
significant growth in content provider sign-ups over the last year, we now have
a reasonable operating history from which to observe the relationship between a
content provider signing up and then starting to promote their content. The lead
time can be up to six months in some cases. We believe that greater support and
assistance to content providers from our expanding partner network and
developments in mobile search and advertising should result in a reduction of
this lead time in the latter half of this year.
The US market is showing tremendous potential, with our US team having signed up
22 content providers by year end, and having generated a growing pipeline of
prospects. US customers see Bango not only as a route to US based customers, but
as a quick and easy route to consumers world-wide through the global reach of
Bango's technology and services. However, the board believes that initial US
growth in end user spending on content will be slower than that experienced in
European markets. The US mobile operators currently have extensive restrictions
on the types of content that they can bill for, pending the introduction of both
detailed content guidelines and processes to ensure adequate age verification of
end users. Bango is well placed to assist content providers in operating within
these constraints. This view is endorsed by the increasing number of US
customers investing in Bango products in preparation for marketing content to
mobile end users, and to gain additional revenues outside the USA.
In the year under review end user spending was below that anticipated earlier in
the year, which was counter-balanced by increased spending on access fees to use
the Bango Service. As restraints on content types are relaxed in the USA and our
partner network builds out, we believe end user spending will accelerate,
bringing that market back in line with more developed markets we operate in, in
line with our original plans.
We are very positive about our ability to exploit our market leading position.
The product line is stronger than ever and we have several innovations coming to
market that the board believes will add competitive strength, accelerate growth
and reduce sales costs. Our direct sales team started the new financial year
three times larger than at the end of March 2005 and we have increased the
number of partners reselling the Bango Service internationally from 3 to 14 at
the year end.
A business with strong and widely applicable technology that gains an early
leadership position gains significant benefits for adopters of its products due
to the 'eco-system' that forms round the business. The Bango team has a track
record of creating such powerful eco-systems that deliver long term value to
shareholders as well as customers. I am therefore pleased that Bango is gaining
an increasing number of partners among not only mobile internet businesses and
mobile operators, but increasingly among the leading internet media companies
who in our experience are starting to recognise the mobile internet opportunity
and develop strategies for addressing it.
Bango is a uniquely well positioned business and there is a great deal of
opportunity ahead in this very exciting market. We look forward to providing a
further progress update at the half year.
Lindsay Bury
Chairman
CEO's Statement
The past financial year was a good one for Bango. The market opportunity
continued to expand and our year-on-year sales growth increased from 65% to
121%. Our gross margin increased by 125% demonstrating the leverage of our
business model and reflecting strong levels of content provider sign ups to pay
package fees to access the Bango system. We won many new global brands as
customers and strengthened our team, product line and partner network, and
created a new high end package for larger content providers. We therefore enter
the new financial year with confidence and enthusiasm.
Successful float on AIM
Early in 2005, the board decided to capitalize on Bango's strong technology and
market position by raising funds to enable the business to accelerate its growth
in the UK and selected overseas territories, to expand our customer support team
and further develop our technology. We are pleased to have completed a
successful IPO on AIM in June 2005, which raised net proceeds of £6.21 million
for the Company. In addition it has raised the Company's profile, increased our
ability to do business with larger customers and is helping us attract and
motivate key staff.
Strengthening the Business
We exploit Bango's unique position in the market by staying relentlessly
focussed in the mainstream of market growth, evolving our products, developing
our strong team, efficiently leveraging our technology through partnership, and
by ensuring that our proposition is clearly marketed, easy to buy and simple to
use.
Product development
During the year our development team continued to add significant new features
and functions to the Bango platform to enable content providers to offer a
better user experience and to reduce the costs of doing business in the mobile
internet. We also added features to the platform that increased the number of
visitors to content providers' sites by providing better integration with mobile
search companies such as Overture (part of Yahoo) and Motionbridge (part of
Microsoft). We believe that promotion of content through mobile search engines
will become an important driver of end user activity in the coming years, and it
is an area where we see good opportunities to leverage our industry position.
The Bango platform handles a high volume of transactions with very high
reliability. For example, in March 2006 the system processed in excess of 40
million mobile transactions across 22,000 different WAP gateways. We saw 361,218
first-time users and 1,266 different mobile phone types. With these volumes
constantly increasing, scalability is key and our development team has made good
progress increasing the capacity of the Bango system to stay ahead of demand,
while ensuring we maintain the reliability of our systems which perform a vital
role for our customers.
Expanding our partner relationships
We partnered with many new companies to increase our efficiency in collecting
money from users for our content providers. PayPal chose to partner with Bango
to expand its reach into mobile content. Cingular Wireless, the largest mobile
operator in the USA selected Bango as its first move in opening up its billing
system to enable payment for content through the internet.
If a content provider wants to create a mobile internet site, they can develop
it themselves or use a specialist mobile company to do it for them. Many
specialist companies have joined the Bango Accredited Partner (BAP) programme to
enable them to re-sell or integrate the Bango Service These companies give our
platform great credibility and also market to content providers outside the
countries where we are directly present. At the end of the year there were 14
partners including Blue Star Mobile, Volantis, Graphico, Entriq, July Systems
and Crisp Wireless.
During the year we announced unique relationships with Orange, O2, Proximus and
Cingular. The benefits to an MNO of opening up the mobile internet (enabling
their end users to access off-portal content) can be gained safely and cost
effectively through partnering with Bango. We expect many further relationships
in the coming years.
Expanding customer base
Bango customers range from global brands such as Manchester United Football
Club, Sony BMG and News International through smaller brands such as
Codemasters, The National Portrait Gallery and Funkimobiles to individuals
running small businesses. They cover a wide range of sectors, including music,
sports, print media, broadcasting, games and phone personalisation. During the
year we have significantly grown our customer base which currently includes
Channel 4, Sony BMG, Hearst Publications, Discovery Mobile, The Sun, Manchester
United Football Club, Codemasters, EMI, Ministry of Sound and WWE.
Sales and marketing
During the year we started investing in establishing regional sales teams,
modelled after our successful UK operations. We established these teams in the
USA, Germany and Spain. They are the countries where the mobile operators were
starting to follow the UK model of encouraging content providers to promote
mobile content.
We believe that the US mobile content market is about 18 months behind the UK
market but growing fast. Many US companies have generated additional revenues
using Bango to export their services to countries outside the USA where the
market for mobile internet content is currently more mature.
Financial Performance
Revenues increased 121% to £7.53million as more content providers signed up for
Bango products and successfully sold mobile internet content via the Bango
platform. Gross Profit increased 125% to £2.19million (29.1% of revenue)(FYE Mar
2005: £0.97m, 28.4 %). The improving margins were driven by increasing sign-ups
to higher margin package fees together with modest price increases in package
fees during the year.
Operating expenses increased in line with expectations by 92% to £3.72million,
reflecting our establishment of sales and support operations in New York,
California, Germany and Madrid, increased spending on product development and
increased marketing activity. The loss for the overall business was increased by
£0.4 million to £1.33 million, as anticipated. The UK operation was
significantly profitable and cash generative over the year, illustrating the
model we expect to become the norm in each country where we have a direct
presence. The cash outflow from operations was broadly in line with the trading
results for the period, reflecting the small change in working capital
requirements despite the substantial increase in turnover.
Following the AIM float in June 2005 through which we raised £6.21M net of
expenses, Bango has started to use these funds to accelerate the commercial
opportunities available, particularly in USA and Europe.
Year ended 31 Change on Year ended 31
March 2006 previous year March 2005
£M % £M
Turnover 7.53 Up 121% 3.41
Gross profit 2.19 Up 125% 0.97
Margin % 29.1% - 28.4%
Operating loss 1.53 Up 64% 0.93
Loss before 1.33 Up 44% 0.92
Cash outflow from operations 1.65 Up 184% 0.58
Cash position 4.86 - 0.32
Basic and fully diluted loss per 5.34 pence Up 22% 4.38 pence
share
Key metrics
The appetite of content providers to use our services is evident from the growth
in sales of standard Bango products and these sales are relatively predictable.
These are recurring monthly charges with a negligible attrition rate, so a base
of predictable high margin sales underpins our business model. We have a wide
range of content providers in a range of market sectors, which provides us with
some very encouraging data on our development:
•The number of content providers spending £5,000 per year or more on
service fees has increased by 250% from 42 in March 2005 to 156 in March
2006.
•The monthly service fees have increased by over 400% from March 2005 to
March 2006.
Strategy for growth for FY 2007
In FY 2007 we will continue our marketing and promotional activities to
communicate the benefits of the Bango Service to content providers. We will also
focus on giving maximum support to our Bango Accredited Partners to enable them
to use the Bango platform to attract and assist customers who want to market
direct to consumer across any mobile operator network. We will also be working
hard to increase the number of users who visit the sites on our platform by
partnering with search companies and by encouraging community activity between
end users and the use of the mobile internet in general.
Outlook
We are encouraged by the rate of content provider sign ups in all territories.
Content providers outside of the UK are taking longer than originally expected
to develop marketing activities that drive end user spend. Accordingly we are
lowering our expectations of the growth in end user spend outside the UK for the
current financial year.
We have established a strong and scalable business. Our growth is accelerating
and the performance indicators are good. We are in a strong financial position
to capitalize on our opportunities.
On behalf of the Board, I would like to express my gratitude to Bango's
customers, partners and employees for their continued support. I would also like
to thank our advisers and shareholders who enabled us to raise funds on the AIM
market to provide both investment and credibility to underpin our ambitious
growth plans. Working with mobile operators, content providers and partners,
other commercial partners and investors, we look forward to continuing success
in the coming years.
Ray Anderson
Chief Executive Officer
BANGO PLC
Audited results for the 12 months ending 31 March 2006
Consolidated summarised Profit and Loss Account
2006 2005
Note £ £
Group turnover 2 7,532,877 3,414,506
Cost of sales 5,341,577 2,439,628
--------------- ---------------
Gross profit 2,191,300 974,878
Other operating
charges 3,719,266 1,933,647
Other operating
income - (25,532)
--------------- ---------------
Operating loss (1,527,966) (933,237)
Interest
receivable - bank
interest 195,069 15,315
--------------- ---------------
Loss on ordinary
activities before
taxation (1,332,897) (917,922)
Tax on loss on ordinary activities - -
--------------- ---------------
Loss for the
financial year (1,332,897) (917,922)
=============== ===============
Basic and diluted
loss per share
(pence) 3 (5.34) (4.38)
=============== ===============
All of the activities of the group are classified as continuing.
The group has no recognised gains or losses other than the results set out
above.
BANGO PLC
Audited results for the 12 months ending 31 March 2006
Consolidated summarised Balance Sheet
2006 2005
£ £
Fixed assets
Tangible assets 343,096 88,533
----------- -----------
Current assets
Debtors 2,267,458 1,048,050
Cash at bank 4,863,004 320,220
----------- -----------
7,130,462 1,368,270
Creditors:
amounts falling
due within one
year 2,186,123 1,211,571
----------- -----------
Net current
assets 4,944,339 156,699
----------- -----------
Total assets less
current
liabilities 5,287,435 245,232
=========== ===========
Capital and reserves
Called-up equity
share capital 5,306,864 4,186,900
Share premium
account 5,255,136 -
Merger reserve 1,236,225 1,236,225
Profit and loss
account (6,510,790) (5,177,893)
------------ -----------
Shareholders'
funds 4 5,287,435 245,232
=========== ============
BANGO PLC
Audited results for the 12 months ending 31 March 2006
Consolidated summarised cash flow statement
2006 2005
£ £
Net cash outflow from operating activities 5 (1,652,206) (583,065)
Returns on investments and servicing of finance
Interest received 195,069 15,315
--------- ---------
Net cash inflow from returns
on investments and servicing
of finance 195,069 15,315
Taxation - -
Capital expenditure
Payments to acquire
tangible fixed assets (333,679) (62,297)
--------- ---------
Net cash outflow from
capital expenditure (333,679) (62,297)
--------- ---------
Cash outflow before
financing (1,790,816) (630,047)
Financing
Issue of equity share
capital 1,119,963 947
Share premium on issue of
equity share capital 5,999,758 810,173
Share issue expense (786,121) (5,507)
--------- -----------
Net cash inflow from
financing 6,333,600 805,613
---------- -----------
Increase in cash 4,542,784 175,566
========= ===========
BANGO PLC
Audited results for the 12 months ending 31 March 2006
Notes
1. Accounting policies and basis of preparation
The summary information presented herein was approved by the Board on 17 May
2006.
Bango plc was incorporated on 8 March 2005 and, on 9 June 2005, acquired the
entire issued share capital of Bango.net Limited by way of a share for share
exchange. On 30 June 2005 the company raised £6.21M via the issue of shares, net
of expenses, and was admitted to trading on AIM.
The acquisition of Bango.net Limited qualifies as a group reconstruction within
the meaning of FRS 6, and has been accounted for using the merger accounting
method. Accordingly the financial information for the current period and
comparatives have been presented as if Bango.net Limited had been owned by Bango
Plc throughout the current and prior periods.
2. Turnover
Turnover is split between the following activities:
2006 2005
£ £
Content access fees 6,470,383 2,902,059
Content provider fees 1,002,619 311,797
Services to Mobile
Network Operators 59,875 200,650
--------- ---------
7,532,877 3,414,506
========== =========
A geographical split of the turnover is given below:
2006 2005
£ £
United Kingdom 6,833,613 3,218,675
EU 254,363 51,590
US and Canada 344,180 104,676
Rest of the World 100,721 39,565
----------- ---------
7,532,877 3,414,506
============ =========
3. Loss per share
2006 2005
Loss for the period £1,332,897 £917,922
Weighted average number of shares in issue 24,983,944 20,918,940
Basic and diluted loss per share 5.34p 4.38p
Share options outstanding at 31 March 2006 are considered to be non-dilutive.
The weighted average number of shares for 2006 and 2005 have been recalculated
based on the share split on 9 June 2005 when each share in the group was
subdivided by 20.
4. Reconciliation of movements in shareholders' funds
Total
Share Share Merger Profit and share-
capital premium reserve loss account holders'funds
£ £ £ £ £
At 1 April 2004 9,520 4,472,092 (4,259,971) 221,641
Proceeds from
issue of Shares 947 946,073 947,020
Share issue costs (5,507) (5,507)
Share for share
exchange 4,186,900 4,186,900
Share issue costs
Retained loss
for the year (917,922) (917,922)
Merger adjustment (10,467) (5,412,658) 1,236,225 (4,186,900)
-------- ---------- --------- --------- ---------
At 1 April 2005 4,186,900 - 1,236,225 (5,177,893) 245,232
Proceeds from
issue of Shares 1,044,776 5,955,224 7,000,000
Share issue costs (786,121) (786,121)
Exercise of share
options 75,188 86,033 161,221
Retained loss
for the year (1,332,897) (1,332,897)
-------- --------- --------- ---------- ---------
At 31 March 2006 5,306,864 5,255,136 1,236,225 (6,510,790) 5,287,435
======== ======== ======== ========== =========
5. Notes to the statement of cash flows
Reconciliation of operating loss to net cash outflow from operating activities
2006 2005
£ £
Operating loss (1,527,966) (933,237)
Shares issued in lieu
of services 41,500 -
Depreciation 76,427 42,874
Decrease/(increase)
in debtors (1,219,408) (188,341)
(Decrease)/increase
in creditors 974,552 495,639
Disposal of fixed
assets 2,689
--------------- ---------------
Net cash outflow from
operating activities (1,652,206) (583,065)
============= ===============
6. Publication of non-statutory accounts
The consolidated profit and loss account, consolidated balance sheet and
consolidated cash flow statement and associated notes for the year-ended 31
March 2006 have been extracted from the group's audited financial statements.
These financial statements have not yet been delivered to the Registrar. The
comparatives have been extracted from the statutory financial instruments of
Bango.net Limited, which have been filed with the Registrar of Companies.
This information is provided by RNS
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