24th Sep 2014 10:32
LONDON (Alliance News) - Proxama PLC Wednesday said its loss widened, as expected, in the first half of the year, as it spent money on developing products and bolstering its sales team, but reiterated that it thinks its time is about to come as mobile contactless payment gains traction.
The mobile wallet and payments provider reported a loss before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of GBP2.5 million for the six months to June 30, wider that the GBP1.3 million Ebitda loss it reported a year earlier. Revenue rose slightly to GBP350,420, from GBP344,344.
It blamed the lack of real revenue growth on its shift in focus from "one-off" revenue contracts to per event and per handset-based recurring revenue.
Proxama reiterated that its expects a much stronger second half and expects revenue to grow substantially during 2015 and contactless payments using smartphones and mobile devices grows.
The company said it was thrilled that Apple Inc decided to include NFC contactless payment technology as a standard feature on its new iPhone 6 and Apple Watch products.
"This is excellent news for Proxama, vindicates our belief and strategy that NFC is the technology for payments on mobile at point of sale and will significantly accelerate the adoption of contactless infrastructure across the western world. All new smartphones now include support for NFC as standard," it said.
Proxama has two main products, its mobile NFC contactless payments plaftform CardGateway and its mobile proximity marketing product TapPoint, which is used with things like QR codes for marketing.
It said it was hit by a setback towards the end of the first half when it ceased working on a mobile wallet product for Weve, the joint venture set up by mobile network operators EE, O2 and Vodafone Group PLC. "It became clear for various reasons that Weve were unable to fully commit to launching the planned cross operator wallet," Proxama said.
However, Praxama owns all the intellectual property for the platform and said it now has a bigger pipleline of opportunities working directly with retailers and banks.
"During the rest of the year we will continue to build our partnerships and platform infrastructure in the UK and USA to enable Proxama to be a core part of the future global retail commerce ecosystem, and ensure that our platforms become the de facto standard for connecting bricks-and-mortar stores with state-of-the-art mobile commerce," Proxama Chief Executive Neil Garner said in a statement.
"Recent developments in the market have renewed our confidence that the leading global retailers, banks and physical media owners will use our platforms to pilot innovative services with the prospect of rolling them out for mass market scale in 2015 and beyond," he said.
Still, its shares were down 8.5% at 3.50 pence Wednesday morning,
By Steve McGrath; [email protected]; @stevemcgrath1
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