Brave Bison Regulatory News (BBSN)

21 July 2022

Brave Bison Group plc

("Brave Bison" or the "Company")

Half Year Trading Update

Revenues double year-on-year

Brave Bison, the social and digital media company, today announces a trading update for the first half of 2022.

Commenting on the trading update, Oliver Green, Chairman, said:

"In the past six months we have successfully integrated four businesses and launched a new, combined customer proposition and trade brand. This has helped deliver a doubling of revenue and record operating profits in the first half of 2022. As a result, the Board expects performance for the full year ended 31 December 2022 to be ahead of current market expectations.

Whilst we note a more challenging macroeconomic environment, we remain confident in Brave Bison's future prospects. First, the business is well capitalised, with £4.8m of net cash, ready to take advantage of new opportunities. Second, over a quarter (and growing) of our workforce is remote, protecting the business from the runaway wage inflation that has challenged our peers. Finally, 50% of our gross profit comes from 13 enterprise customers, and 50% of our gross profit comes from a long tail of global customers, providing excellent diversity of income."

Financial Highlights: triple-digit growth in KPIs

(1) Adj. EBITDA is defined as earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation, and after adding back acquisition costs, restructuring costs and share-based payments. Under IFRS16 most of the costs associated with the Company's property leases are classified as depreciation and interest, therefore Adj. EBITDA is stated before deducting these costs.

(2) Adj. Operating Profit is stated after adding back acquisition costs, restructuring costs and share-based payments, and is after the deduction of costs associated with property leases.

· Significant growth in both revenue and gross profit during the period. New clients onboarded include Rapyd, Asus, Viking Direct, Paperchase, Lloyds Direct, Autoglym and World Economic Forum

· Record first-half adjusted operating profit of £1.2m (H1 2021: £0.4m). This represents a 15% adjusted operating margin on gross profit, in-line with management expectations

· Net cash of £4.8m (December 2021: £4.7m, June 2021: £2.9m) a small increase for the period following the acquisition of Best Response Media and unwinding of working capital. Gross cash of £5.4m (December 2021: £5.9m, June 2021: £3.0m), with no further deferred consideration payable following the payment of £0.75m during the period in respect of the Greenlight acquisition

Strategic & Corporate Highlights: compounding operational improvements

· Successful launch of the new Brave Bison trade brand (www.bravebison.com), an important step in continuing to drive customer cross-selling and acquisition integration

· Two major customer wins (totalling £1.7m in aggregate for 2022) in both Brave Bison Social & Influencer, the Company's social media advertising practice, and Brave Bison Commerce, the Company's digital commerce practice

· Appointment of Gordon Brough, ex-General Counsel at Aberdeen Asset Management plc, as Independent Non-Executive Director, bringing extensive public company and M&A experience to the Brave Bison Board

· Acquisition and integration of Best Response Media, a specialist Adobe ecommerce development company. Brave Bison Commerce now provides clients with the full spectrum of enterprise ecommerce technologies including Salesforce, SAP, Adobe and BigCommerce

For further information please contact:

Brave Bison Group plc

Oliver Green, Chairman via Cenkos

Theo Green, Chief Growth Officer

Philippa Norridge, Chief Financial Officer

Cenkos Securities plc Tel: +44 (0)20 7397 8900

Nominated Adviser & Broker

Nicholas Wells

Ben Jeynes

About Brave Bison

Brave Bison (AIM: BBSN) is a social and digital media company, headquartered in London with a globally distributed workforce across eight countries.

Brave Bison is unique in that it is both a digital media owner, as well as a digital media agency. The Company owns and operates its own channels, and the communities attached to them, as well as offering customers a suite of advertising services to help reach digital audiences.

Brave Bison has two core lines of business. Firstly, the publishing of content on social media channels to generate advertising revenue. Brave Bison operates over 650 channels including PGA Tour and US Open on YouTube, Cooking Wild and DIY & Crafts on Facebook and Slick and VSatisfying on Snap Discover.

The second line of business involves the execution of social and digital advertising campaigns for global, blue-chip brands such as Panasonic, New Balance, Primark, Vodafone and Curry's. These customers are serviced through three divisions: Brave Bison Social & Influencer, a social media advertising practice, Brave Bison Commerce, a digital commerce practice, and Brave Bison Performance, a paid and organic digital media practice. 

The information contained within this announcement is deemed by the Company to constitute inside information as stipulated under the Market Abuse Regulations (EU) No. 596/2014 as amended by regulation 11 of the Market Abuse (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019/310. Upon the publication of this announcement via Regulatory Information Service, this inside information is now considered to be in the public domain.