Blackbird PLC Regulatory News (BIRD)

27.04.12

Forbidden Technologies plc

(AIM: FBT)

("Forbidden" or the "Company")

AGM STATEMENT

The following statement will be made at today's Annual General Meeting by Forbidden Technologies Chairman, Vic Steel.

The Company confirms that its annual report and notice of its AGM were sent to shareholders on 3 April 2012 and made available on its website.

The Company has continued to make good progress in its strategy to develop a sustainable and scalable business for the long term. We remain focused on our principal channel partners, companies with deep knowledge and successful penetration of their markets, and we continue to build on these relationships.

Since the 2011 AGM, we have made further developments and improvements to our proprietary technology, both in terms of professional and consumer applications of the FORscene platform. We have added much more capacity, including removing the database bottleneck with a 50 times increase in database access speed. The same hardware infrastructure is now able to support a greater number of customers, with the potential to achieve higher margins as economies of scale are achieved.

The introduction of our innovative multicam facility increases our attractiveness across Broadcast, News and Sports channels. We now support many more workflows and our adoption of MOS (Media Object Server) protocol, an industry standard, should help ensure that our products can be seamlessly integrated into larger systems. 

In broadcast Post Production we are experiencing strong continuing growth. Over the past twelve months we have added a further sixteen post houses and production companies and are benefiting from regular repeat business as more and more companies are choosing FORscene as their preferred, advanced cloud-based video platform. After good growth in 2011, invoiced broadcast sales in the first quarter of 2012 are showing a further 60% increase over the corresponding period in 2011.

At last week's National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas our team of six executives conducted hour by hour meetings and product demonstrations with a number of major companies in the Broadcast market and received positive comments on the FORscene platform. The promotion of Cloud solutions by third parties as the way forward in video post production allows FORscene to be viewed as a distinctive and advanced, proven solution for editing in the Cloud across a number of channels.

In Professional web video our U.S. partner BIM has agreements to add further TV stations to its user base over the coming months. We anticipate that this, together with our higher quality web offering, will result in further growth in this area in the current financial year.

The availability of the Android version of Clesh has increased our exposure and profile in the consumer market since its launch in spring 2011. Clesh is now available across multiple devices and provides a strong base on which to build consumer use of our technology.

The Android Clesh app has now over 5,000 signed up accounts and works on some 750 different devices from multiple manufacturers.

Internationally, we expect the appointment of TechTel in Singapore as our distributor in South East Asia to attract new customers in Broadcast, News and Sports in the region. The Company plans to take part in the Broadcast Asia Convention in Singapore in June 2012. Additionally discussions are in progress in both the Middle East and North America in Broadcast and News.

In line with our practice of re-investing the proceeds of sales growth into more resources to fuel further expansion, we have, in the last twelve months, employed two more executives in R&D and recently appointed a digital marketer and a video producer / editor to strengthen the sales and marketing functions.

In summary, as using the Cloud is increasingly seen to be the most efficient way to organise workflows, FORscene continues to deliver cost and time benefits for its end users. Awareness of FORscene is growing and the ability to use the platform from anywhere at anytime on so many devices is increasingly being recognised.

We are confident that the Company will grow faster this year than last year and that the building blocks are in place for further growth.

-Ends-

For more information, please visit www.forbidden.co.uk or contact:

Forbidden Technologies plc

Stephen Streater, CEO

Tel: +44 (0)20 8879 7245

N+1 Brewin

Aubrey Powell, Nominated Adviser

Derrick Lee, Corporate Finance

Tel: +44 (0)20 3201 3170

Cenkos Securities plc, Broker

Adrian Hargrave, Corporate Finance

Alex Aylen, Sales

Tel: +44 (0)20 7397 8900

Bishopsgate Communications

Deepali Schneider / Lynne Goulding

Tel: +44 (0)20 7562 3350