Vianet Grp Regulatory News (VNET)

Vianet Group plc

("Vianet" or the "Group")

Trading Update and Notice of Interim Results

Vianet Group plc (AIM: VNET), the international provider of actionable data and business insight through devices connected to its Internet of Things ("IOT") platform, today provides the following trading update and notifies that it will release its results for the half year ended 30 September 2019 on Thursday, 12 December 2019.

The Group is pleased to report that trading for the first half of the current financial year has been strong, with revenue and operating profit growth in line with market expectations.

The Smart Machines division, including Vendman, has delivered a strong year on year increase in the number of connected devices deployed, underpinned by three recent contract wins announced in August 2019. These three long-term contracts with leading vending operators for a combined 20,000 units will generate in the region of £10 million of revenue for the Group over their three to five-year contract terms.

Helped by investment in Pubco data analytics capability and technology upgrades, the Smart Zones division contribution was also robust in the first half. This performance was achieved despite delays due to Pubco corporate activity.

James Dickson, Chairman of Vianet, commented: "The team has continued to make very good commercial progress, particularly with contract wins for our telemetry and payment solutions in the coffee vending and unattended retail vending market, with solid support from our Smart Zones business which is developing new revenue lines. Double digit growth in the period builds on our successful recent track record and further demonstrates that the strategy of leveraging the power of our cutting edge technology to bring game changing business insight to our customers has exciting prospects."  

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About Vianet

Vianet Group is a leading provider of actionable management information and business insight created through combining data from our smart Internet of Things ('IOT') solutions and external information sources.

Since Admission to AIM in 2006, the Group has grown from its core beer monitoring business both organically and through strategic acquisitions to widen its offering and also develop new businesses, especially in vending telemetry and contactless payment solutions particularly for the premium coffee sector.

Servicing over 300 customers across the world and rendering live data to our IOT platform from over 250,000 connected machines daily, Vianet is one of the largest business to business (b2b) connected solutions providers in Europe with established long term relationships with blue chip customers and growing recurring revenues which are over 85% of our total revenues.

In our Smart Machines Division we connect a single data gathering device with its own on-board communication capability to a customer's asset or system. The device then sends data back via our IOT platform to cloud based servers. The technology was originally developed for automated retailing machines, however the flexibility and functionality of the device means the technology can be applied to practically any machine which has the capability to output data. The device is also used to connect our contactless payment solution and communicate payment terms to our cloud based payment services providers where that application is also required.

The Smart Zones Division is where we connect multiple data gathering devices into one or more systems or assets with the data from those devices being communicated back to our IOT platform and cloud based servers via a single 3G communications hub. The technology was originally developed for flow monitoring devices, temperature sensors, and asset management in drinks retailing but practically any data gathering device with a digital output could be connected to the communications hub where required such as gaming machines, utilities management and EPOS.

For further information, please visit www.vianetplc.com