Velocity Comp Regulatory News (VEL)

18 Jan 2010 07:00



FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

18 January 2010

Velti Plc

Year-End Trading Update

Velti plc ('Velti' or 'the Company'), the leading mobile marketing and advertising technology provider for advertising agencies, mobile operators and media, announces that it has achieved a strong financial performance for 2009. Overall, Velti is experiencing increasing demand for its products and services from existing and new customers, which are increasingly allocating budgets to the mobile channel on a global basis.

As a result of strengthening customer demand and expansion into new global markets, the Company expects its performance for the year ending 31 December 2009 to have been broadly in line with market expectations with total revenues (including other income) in excess of €65 million, an increase of approximately 24 per cent on 2008. 

Key drivers for 2009

The strong growth achieved in 2009 reflects a combination of:

Expansion of the Business

During 2009, we ran more than 2,000 campaigns globally for 450 brands, agencies and mobile operators. 

In 2009 we expanded our relationships with global mobile operator groups. For Orange, we established ad serving contracts in France, UK, Spain, Poland, Romania and Moldova. For Orascom/WIND Group, we established mobile marketing contracts in Italy, Egypt, Algeria, Greece, and the rest of their operations in Africa and the Middle East. These, together with significant wins for the mobile marketing and loyalty campaigns for operators, provide ongoing revenue without the need to pitch competitively for each new campaign, which will continue to form an important part of our operator strategy in 2010.

We also continued to expand our relationships with brands and agencies. Net revenue from previous customers grew significantly year-on-year and comprised approximately two thirds of our 2009 net revenues. Our relationship with UK multi-channel retailer Argos (flagship of the Home Retail Group) illustrates this strategy. After initially engaging Velti in 2008 to increase sell-through rates and improve customer satisfaction, the group, which has c. 700 stores and annual revenue of c. £4.3 billion, has steadily added Velti mobile marketing capabilities resulting in 82 per cent year-on-year growth in revenues from the client.

In April 2009, we completed the acquisition of Ad Infuse, a leading US mobile ad network with customers including Orange, Swisscom, Sky, CBS and Shazam, 31 employees based in San Francisco, New York and London and a highly experienced management team. Ad Infuse’s best-of-breed mobile ad serving and routing technology platforms enable advertisers, publishers, brands and operators to place ads on multiple networks and manage them in real time. We have incorporated the technology acquired from Ad Infuse’s mobile advertising platform into Velti’s platform to create the first end-to-end solution for media planning, campaign management, optimization, execution, analytics and hosting of mobile marketing and advertising campaigns. This new integrated platform, already live at beta customers since October, is called Velti mGage™ and was launched globally earlier this week.

In Greater China, we continued our expansion through our investment in Casee, as well as our direct Velti sales force selling to regional mobile operators like China Mobile, China Unicom and Far EasTone in Taiwan. Casee, as the largest mobile advertising exchange in China, continues to demonstrate solid growth.

Our joint venture with India's HTMedia began to bear fruit during 2009. The joint venture launched its first campaigns in June, completed integration of mobile direct response into the Hindustan Times newspaper and established commercial relationships with 17 operators.

We continued our expansion in Eastern Europe, securing contracts with Globul, Mtel and Vivatel in Bulgaria, Avea (one of the three large operators in Turkey with 12.5 million subscribers), and MTS amongst others.

Our expansion continued into Latin America, where we won contracts with Movistar in Mexico and Cable & Wireless in Panama.

We also launched numerous campaigns in the Middle East and Africa. We ran mobile marketing campaigns for mobile operators including Zain, Mobinil (Egypt), Jawwal (Palestine), Du (UAES), Mobilink (Pakistan) and Batelco, the principal mobile provider in Bahrain.

Furthermore, we saw continued progress by Ansible, Velti's joint venture with Interpublic Group, with client wins including Microsoft, Timberland, Sony, HP, Hyundai, and the American Heart Association.

To help guide the next stage of Velti's global growth, we hired a new CFO in 2009. Wilson W. Cheung joined Velti from AXT, Inc., a NASDAQ-listed semiconductor firm, where he had been CFO since 2004. Prior to AXT, he held senior financial positions at NASDAQ-listed Yahoo! Inc. and Interwave Communications. A Certified Public Accountant, Mr. Cheung has worked as an auditor with Deloitte & Touche and KPMG and has brought to Velti significant compliance and operational skills.

Finally, in October, the Company announced its redomiciliation in Jersey, through the creation of a new Jersey-incorporated, AIM-listed company named Velti plc as the holding company of Velti and its subsidiaries. Velti plc is now tax resident in the Republic of Ireland. 

David Mann, Non-Executive Chairman commented: "Velti has continued to perform very well, delivering increased revenue and profit in the face of economic difficulties across all our markets. As we move beyond the global recession of 2008-2009, Velti is well positioned to take advantage of renewed business activity and increased focus on mobile marketing and advertising by brands, agencies and mobile operators around the world. We look forward to another year of very satisfactory growth in 2010."

Alexandros Moukas, Chief Executive Officer added: "Velti enters 2010 as the global leader in mobile marketing and advertising, well positioned to benefit from the shift from non-measured, impression-based media (TV, print) to measureable media (online, mobile). In addition to organic growth across all vertical segments and regions, Velti is gaining traction from our strategic acquisitions and joint ventures. The beginning of consolidation in the space through Google's acquisition of AdMob and Apple's acquisition of Quattro Wireless underline the fact that the mobile marketing and advertising market is expected to grow considerably in 2010 and Velti is very well positioned to benefit from that growth."

END

For further information, please contact:

Velti

Bankside Consultants

RBC Capital Markets