ACT.L Regulatory News (ACT)

This announcement contains inside information for the purposes of Article 7 of EU Regulation 596/2014 (which forms part of domestic UK law pursuant to the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018).

10 December 2021

Actual Experience plc

(the "Company" or "Actual Experience" or "Actual")

Year End Trading update

Actual Experience (AIM: ACT), the analytics-as-a-service company, today announces a trading update for its financial year ended 30 September 2021. The Company intends announcing its results for the year in January 2022.

Our first full year operating our professional services 'land and expand' model has seen good progress, faster customer engagement and quicker software deployment. The hybrid workplace revolution has seen continued momentum, prompting a wider recognition by the market of the power of our unique technology. Together with the launch of our direct sales function, and enhanced engagement with our Channel Partners, this has resulted in new business wins as announced in recent months, for our Business Impact Assessment (BIA), and our Continuous Improvement (CI) services.

In respect of the financial year just ended, the Company generated revenues of £1.7m (2020: £1.9m); £0.1m of the reduction from the previous year was attributable to the fall in value of sterling against the US dollar. As planned, the Company incurred a pre-tax loss as a result of the ongoing investment in technology, sales and marketing functions. Looking forward, we expect to begin to benefit from the ramp up of revenues being generated by new business wins, set against the probability that a long standing contract (originally announced in 2018 via a Channel Partner), that relies on our legacy offering, will not renew in the coming months due to a change in customer strategy. This contract generated revenues of £1.2m in the year just ended.

Following the placing conducted in January 2021, Actual Experience retains a solid financial position with year end net cash standing at £8.2m (30 September 2020: £2.7m), with slightly reduced cash outflows from operating activities of £3.7m for the year (2020: £3.9m).

Overall, whilst we have made good progress during the year, our sales cycle remains lengthy and efforts to reduce this are being hampered by the pandemic and the resultant elongation of procurement processes.

Encouragingly, however, we are seeing good momentum in our targeting of a growing range of direct and Channel Partner sales opportunities, including many large global blue-chip customers. From our sales pipeline development during the financial year, 16 large blue chip opportunities emerged. Of these one has already moved into CI, three have completed their BIA and are now considering moving to CI, whilst the remaining engagements continue to move forward with only one having dropped out of the pipeline. 

The current total addressable market of employees in our target enterprises has grown from four million to more than 12 million since January 2021 and we expect to see more opportunities emerge from this funnel in the coming financial year.

Dave Page, CEO of Actual Experience plc, commented:

"In 2021 we demonstrated our 'land and expand' business model and ability to win large global blue-chip customers with our new customer offering. Going into 2022, our focus will be continuing to convert the 15 large scale opportunities to ongoing CI wins. Through the direct and partner sales channels we will continue to develop similar new opportunities from our funnel, delivering more new business wins to generate long term, profitable contracted revenues. We are excited by the prospects in our pipeline and the immediate opportunities in front of us, notwithstanding the challenge of lengthy sales cycles, which we are working with our customers to reduce."

Enquiries:

Glossary

Business Impact Assessment (BIA) - typically undertaken for a representative sample of employees, BIA establishes an organisation's people, planet and business opportunity, and hence ROI, that would be realised by improving their digital workplace using our Continuous Improvement service.

Continuous Improvement (CI) - designed to be undertaken for all digitally enabled employees, CI is the ongoing use of Actual Experience analytics-as-a-service to improve an organisation's digital workplace in order to realise the people, planet and business opportunity identified in the BIA.

Pipeline - Actual Experience's pipeline of new business consists of a set of customers at various stages of the sales process starting with customers that have been identified by Actual Experience and/or its Channel Partners for a targeted sales campaign.

About Actual Experience

Actual Experience's goal is to make the digital world work properly for everybody, everywhere, all of the time.

Our analytics-as-a-service has been developed from 10 years of academic research. Using patented technology, the Company analyses the human experience of digital services. In essence, Actual Experience's analytics-as-a-service creates a new, unique and highly actionable dataset that helps CHROs and CEOs to quantify and realise the opportunity it has to accelerate their people, planet and business agenda through the improvement of their digital workplace. No interaction with employees is required.

The focus of our analytics-as-a-service is on improving the digital workplace, creating a level playing field for all employees, improving business efficiency, and enabling the reduction of business travel and hence carbon emissions. In this way, it also provides important new data so that companies can act to drive their ESG and DE&I agenda.

Actual Experience is listed on the London Stock Exchange (AIM: ACT). Our corporate headquarters is in Bath, UK. Actual Experience's unique and patented digital analytics-as-a-service is founded on cutting-edge research at Queen Mary University of London.

For further information please visit www.actual-experience.com