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LONDON (Alliance News) - Forbidden Technologies PLC Monday posted a widened pretax loss for 2013, as it hired further research and development staff and increased promotional costs in 2013.
Forbidden owns and develops a cloud video editing platform called FORscene.
The company posted a pretax loss of GBP802,778, widened from a pretax loss of GBP270,318, as revenue declined to GBP772,180 from GBP812,744 in the previous year. Administrative expenses rose to GBP1.5 million from GBP963,237 in the previous year, as it bolstered its headcount and saw higher promotional costs.
Comparative revenue reflected the one-off benefit of the 2012 Olympic Games in the previous year.
The company raised GBP8 million in a placing during the year, and the proceeds will go towards accelerating growth in the coming years, Forbidden said.
Forbidden said that it had appointed public relations company Wall Street PR in December 2013 to help raise its profile amongst broadcasters. It also appointed Marketing Team Direct in August 2013 to review the company's brand. The company said this project is close to completion, and its revamped brand will be shown at the NAB convention in Las Vegas in April.
"We got ourselves into a position in the UK where Forbidden and FORscene, our main B2B brand, were confused in peoples minds, what you see in the re-brand is that Forbidden comes to the fore and gives us an umbrella under which to put other product lines," Business Development Director Greg Hirst told Alliance News.
The company established a US subsidiary in Burbank, California, in March called Forbidden Technologies Inc, and noted that its US team has identified a list of customer opportunities in both reality television and sports. It is in the process of installing a number of trial servers with potential customers, Forbidden said.
"It's very much a business to business focus to begin with, taking advantage of a market that is at least ten times the size of what we've got in Western Europe," Hirst said.
The company is currently developing an iPad version of its Clesh mobile app, which it launched three years ago.
"In a sense what we're trying to do is make ForScene available to all editors, as well as everybody else," Chief Executive Stephen Streater told Alliance News. The firm is aiming at media professionals, "The editor in the back of the limousine who's too busy to turn up an edit suite," says Streater, "Really [the iPad app] is to push us much further into the professional world where our competitors don't have iPad apps, they have mobiles apps."
Forbidden is looking to expand towards a consumer market with its products, having primarily focused on business to business so far.
"At the moment something like 98% of our turnover is business to business," Streater said. "Now that there are over a billion camera phones that can shoot HD video, there are all these consumers there that can shoot HD video but they can't do anything with it. What we've found is that the people who use editing on their phones spend a lot of money on data, which is attractive for a lot of the mobile phone operators."
"Then there are the smartphone manufacturers that want to show off their latest smartphones and what they really need is something like video editing that uses the power on their new phones," said Streater.
However, to draw in customers, Forbidden is looking at releasing a free version of the product to build up a customer base, and encourage the take up of the paid app; 'fremium' app.
"We're gearing up for the launch of a consumer version. What we're planning is to launch a fremium consumer version which will allow consumers to edit their video just enough to be able to tidy up," Streater said. "The plan is to make a range of little mini consumer apps, and hopefully get up into the millions of users, once you're in the millions of users that opens the door to the operators and the manufacturers that have billions of users, and also the social networks who are really lacking any proper video editing tools."
Shares in Forbidden were trading up 0.6% at 27.66 pence Monday afternoon.
By Hana Stewart-Smith; hanassmith@alliancenews.com; @HanaSSAllNews
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