Netcall Share News (NET)

LONDON (Alliance News) - Netcall PLC Tuesday expressed confidence in a "successful outcome" for its full year, as it saw revenue and pretax profit rise slightly in the first half of the financial year.

Pretax profit rose to GBP1.37 million in the six months to end-December, from GBP1.34 million a year earlier, as revenues crept up to GBP8.4 million from GBP8.2 million.

The cloud-based customer service software company said that its recently launched Liberty platform and Business Process Management software were performing well, and it had won new customers, offsetting declining sales of its MovieLine service.

MovieLine, a telephony based cinema booking service, was acquired by Netcall along with the acquisition of Telephonetics in 2010. However, the service has seen user numbers decline as trends move towards online cinema ticket booking. Netcall said that this service was not part of its core product mix, and although it is declining, a shift away from it in the company's product mix means that this won't have as much of a negative impact.

In January, Netcall was part of a group that made a GBP1 million investment in Macranet Ltd, which trades as Sentiment. Netcall's contribution in this investment was up to GBP250,000, and it made the investment to address the "growing importance of social media as a channel for customer interaction."

Netcall is looking to add more media capabilities to the Liberty platform, Chief Executive Henrik Bang told Alliance News. "We're trying to build an all-in-one solution package to really deal with customer requirements end to end."

"Next month we'll be releasing our chat products, then we'll have our social media products. Then we'll do something about outbound customer contacts," Bang said.

The company will integrate Sentiment, which provides a service that collects customer sentiment across social media platforms, into its products.

"In many cases its not just measuring the sentiment, but finding out what social media feeds are relevant," Bang said. "It may be a customer asking specifically about a utility bill, but it may also be customers having conversations about you, where you're not directly involved. It's about how you manage that."

Bang thinks it is also a good way of gathering customer intelligence. "It's a big data-mining exercise. If you look at these Twitter feeds there's a zillion of them going around so its about adding the right searches and fields," Bang said.

Netcall said that positive momentum and high levels of recurring revenue had increased its revenue visibility for the second half of the financial year.

It said that acquisitions remain an important part of its growth strategy, and that it was continuing to assess the market for complementary acquisitions.

Bang said the company is in active discussions with a number of companies but doesn't feel any urgency to make quick moves, although he denied that this meant there were no immediate acquisitions on the horizon.

"We're always in active discussions with a number of companies. Whether or not that'll turn into anything immediate enough, I don't know."

Bang said that the kind of acquisitions Netcall would be considering would be to add technology. "We'd like to have a technology addition, there's things we want to develop ourselves, things we want to partner on and things we'd like to develop through acquisition. We don't like to be too specific as if the wrong people hear it the price will go up," Bang said.

"We like businesses with a customer base, businesses that are a business, not just a small group of people who are inventing something, we like there to be a backbone," Bang said. "Finally something that we can be assured we can convert it into a good performance. That's the ideal scenario."

Shares in Netcall were trading down 1.8% at 54.00 pence Tuesday afternoon.

By Hana Stewart-Smith; hanassmith@alliancenews.com; @HanaSSAllNews

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