28th Jul 2014 10:25
LONDON (Alliance News) - CloudBuy PLC, the ecommerce marketplace based in the cloud, Monday said that trading in the first six months of 2014 means its on track to meet market expectations for the year as a whole, with spend analysis and eProcurement invoicing growing by 50%.
It said most of this new business fell at the end of the period, and the invoiced revenue will be recognised in future periods. That means recognised revenue for the first half of the year will be similar to the first half of 2013. It posted revenue of GBP1.1 million in the first six months of 2013.
It also predicted that it will book a loss for the first half of this year, due to costs related to its expansion into Asia Pacific. However, it said this is offset by a strong pipeline of contract wins that it expects to deliver in the second half of the year.
The company said it had analysed over USD10 billion of spend in Asia Pacific in the first six months and this has provided good visibility of the future pipeline across the large participating organisations. It said a number of the testers had been government organisations, which have been through a process of validation and testing over the past six months, prior to releasing data and creating business cases for the implementation of the cloudBuy marketplace.
Its initial expansion out of the UK and US was focused on Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong, but it is also making progress in India, where it has built a pipeline of opportunities with large Indian companies and global corporates. It is working with Visa Asia Pacific and its member banks to develop this market.
CloudBuy said it has also had requests from corporate and government bodies in the Middle East and Africa for spend analysis and marketplace solutions, and it believes there are good opportunities in the Middle East including the potential for a live project in the second half of this year. It is working with Oracle Corp in the region.
On June 16, the company had reacted to a slide in its share price by saying it wasn't aware of any reason for the fall and it was expecting to win a number of significant contracts in the next few months after its prospects and leads accelerated ahead of plan.
That sparked a small recovery in the share price, but it remains well below the peak of 69.75 pence hit in September last year. The company's shares were up 5.5% at 35.35 pence Monday morning.
"The scale of each of our current opportunities gives me the confidence that we have three ways to achieve our 2-4 year objective of GBP50 million revenue at 90% margin, and organisationally we are focused on the actions we need to undertake to ensure that we deliver on this objective," Chairman Ronald Duncan said in the company's trading update Monday.
"It is always difficult to establish the first live project in a new business area or geography but we have achieved this with live clients in Asia Pacific to give confidence to our prospects, we anticipate faster closure across the pipeline," he added.
Cloudbuy expects to release its interim results for the six months to June 30 on August 21.
By Steve McGrath; [email protected]; @stevemcgrath1
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