7th Dec 2015 08:45
LONDON (Alliance News) - Shares in mobile marketing company InternetQ PLC were up 21% Monday morning, after it issued a series of rebuttals in a response to a blog post about the company last week.
Last Thursday, website ShareProphets published a blog questioning InternetQ's business model, causing shares in the company to drop sharply.
InternetQ said it is not its policy to comment on articles or blogs on the internet. However, given the "serious nature" of the allegations made in the blog and the subsequent fall in the company's share price, it believes it is "important to address the comments made in the blog".
InternetQ refuted a number of claims made by the blog post, including that the company is "misleading" in capitalising "the majority" of its operating costs and therefore reporting "high" profits. The company said it only capitalises a minority of its operating costs and asserted that its accounting polices fully comply with International Financial Reporting Standards.
Of note, the blog post had alleged that in relation to its revenue in Russia, InternetQ has a relationship with three companies called Twinsbox LLC, Adviator Media and Betta Technology. However, InternetQ said the three companies are not related parties, and said that the appearance of its office address on the websites of these companies "appears to be a case of 'content scraping'".
InternetQ has now threatened those third parties with legal action, and Adviator Media, which InternetQ now understands to have been previously known as Twinsbox LLC, has since removed the address from its website. InternetQ said that five years ago Twinsbox had acted as a trial local agent for the company. However it was not successful in this capacity, and the arrangement was ended "shortly thereafter".
InternetQ confirmed that it had occasionally interacted with Adviator in relation to Adviator acting as a low-value systems technical integration facilitator and contractor on behalf of Russian mobile networks or mobile aggregators active in the Russian market. InternetQ said that it has never made any payments to, or received payments from any of these companies, either directly or indirectly.
Shares in InternetQ were up 22% at 75.64pence Monday morning.
By Hana Stewart-Smith; [email protected]; @HanaSSAllNews
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