Something else to add to the pot. pt17 Jan 2021 15:23
Investors overreact to LoopUp warning
¦ Higher churn and lower revenue in non-professional segments.
¦ Pipeline of live cloud telephony opportunities has potential contract value of £84m.
LoopUp (LOOP:84p), a London-based premium remote conference meetings company, downgraded revenue expectations on Friday while I was on leave. The market reaction was savage with the shares halving in value and slicing through my 138p entry point (‘Tap into the remote working boom with LoopUp’, 2 July 2020). Having seen the share price rally 80 per cent to 250p by late summer, passing through my initial 225p target price in the process, the holding is now 40 per cent underwater. Although any downgrade is disappointing, in this case I feel investors have massively overreacted.
Firstly, business remains strong in LoopUp’s key professional service verticals where data privacy and security is paramount (law, accountancy, investment banking, corporate finance, private equity, asset management, insurance, PR and marketing). Minute volumes are 43 per cent higher on average (during September and October) than pre-pandemic levels. This growth driver is still in place.
Secondly, the issue is in non-professional (and non-core) segments which account for 14 per cent of platform revenue. Minute volumes have fallen 10 per cent (compared to pre-pandemic levels), and churn has spiked to 30 per cent, a reflection that non-professional segments face greater competition from rivals Zoom and Microsoft Teams, and clients suffer greater financial distress and have higher levels of employee furloughing. Although this pressure is unlikely to ease anytime soon, these are non-core segments and account for a diminishing amount of LoopUp’s overall revenue.
Thirdly, there has been a shift in the call mix towards lower-rated domestic and dial-out minutes away from higher rated international and dial-in minutes, a reflection of the depressed number of international deals being done. This in turn has impacted the average revenue per minute. However, as cross-border activity bounces back from depressed levels during the global economic recovery, then international usage should bounce back, too.
Fourthly, although analysts at Panmure Gordon have downgraded their 2020 revenue estimates from £55.6m to £50m, cash profit will still be more than double from £6.4m in 2019 to £15m to deliver annual pre-tax profit of £8.3m and earnings per share (EPS) of around 14.5p. Moreover, analysts’ new 2021 revenue estimate of £35.5m is based on LoopUp’s current revenue run-rate of £34m and factors in no contribution from the recently launched cloud telephony [integrated with Microsoft Teams] business. This product offering enables clients to make and receive external calls via a third-party network direct routing to companies using Microsoft Teams, alongside its own premium remote meetings capability.
Bearing this in mind, the directors note that the pipeline of live opportunities here has
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