Eagle Eye Sol Gp PLC - Final Results

16 September 2020

Eagle Eye Solutions Group plc

("Eagle Eye", the "Group", or the "Company")

Final Results for the year ended 30 June 2020

Successful international expansion, significant growth in adjusted EBITDA and revenue

Eagle Eye, a leading SaaS technology company that creates digital connections enabling personalised, real-time marketing through coupons, loyalty, apps, subscriptions and gift services, is pleased to announce its results for the financial year ended 30 June 2020 (the "Year").

Financial Highlights

Operational Highlights

·      Continued growth of the Tier 1 customer base both in the UK and in new geographies resulting in an uplift in "win" related revenue

·      Two flagship international clients won and reached go-live in the year, The Warehouse Group in New Zealand and Southeastern Grocers in the USA

·      Growing number of powerful collaborations to target the US market: dunnhumby, Ecrebo and News America Marketing

·      AIR volumes grew by 140% year-on-year to 2.1bn (FY19: 0.9bn)

·      Continued innovation and platform enhancements, including 30% improvement in speed and responsiveness and new analytics integrations

·      Contract extensions with Sainsbury's, ASDA and JD Sports in the UK

·      Long term contract customer churn rate by value remained very low at 0.9% (FY19: 0.8%)

Outlook

·      Positive start to FY21 despite COVID-19 with current trading in line with Board's expectations

·      Board confident the Group continues to have sufficient headroom within its £5m banking facility, which has been extended to September 2021, to support its existing growth plans

Notes

* EBITDA has been adjusted for the exclusion of share-based payment charges along with depreciation, amortisation, interest and tax from the measure of profit and is reconciled to the GAAP measure of loss before tax in note 5 to the financial statements below.

** Net cash/(debt) is cash and cash equivalents less borrowings.

Tim Mason, Chief Executive of Eagle Eye, said: "In spite of the challenging global outlook, we have continued to make excellent progress against our strategic objectives this year, winning new clients internationally and delivering leading loyalty and promotions programmes for some of the largest retailers in the world. Our people have been outstanding during these challenging times, and I am assured of our ability to respond to whatever may lie ahead.

"The global pandemic has prompted the acceleration of digital transformation in the retail sector and never has digital engagement with consumers been of more relevance. We will continue to invest in our people, product development, sales and marketing, and in new geographies during the year ahead, whilst carefully managing the business and cost-base. This will enable us to capitalise on the accelerated digital transformation in the retail sector, as well as sustain the momentum we have gained in the US and Australasia.

"With our growing number of Tier 1 clients, proven technological ability, powerful international partners and a strengthening financial position, I am confident for the future."

About Eagle Eye

Eagle Eye is a leading SaaS technology company transforming marketing by creating digital connections that enable personalised performance marketing in real time through coupons, loyalty, apps, subscriptions and gift services. 

Eagle Eye AIR enables the secure issuance and redemption of digital offers and rewards at scale, across multiple channels, enabling a single customer view. We create a network between merchants, brands and audiences to enable customer acquisition, interaction and retention at lower cost whilst driving marketing innovation.

The Company's current customer base comprises leading names in UK Grocery, Retail and Food & Beverage sectors, including Asda, Sainsbury's, Tesco, Waitrose and John Lewis & Partners, JD Sports, Greggs, Mitchells & Butlers, Pizza Express; in North America, Loblaws, Shoppers Drug Mart,  Esso and Southeastern Grocers and in New Zealand, The Warehouse Group.

Chairman's Statement

I am delighted to report on another successful Year for Eagle Eye, during what has been a challenging time for all, delivering 21% growth in revenue, a significant improvement in adjusted EBITDA to £3.3m (2019: £0.7m) and a considerably improved cash position.

The challenges of operating during a global pandemic have underlined the Group's resilience, agility, and ability to adapt to the new operational environment, demonstrating the benefits of the initiatives commenced in the prior year, such as the move to the Google Cloud Platform ("GCP") and our commitment to investing in line with, not ahead of, revenue growth. Our people and the AIR platform have continued to deliver for our major clients; we have won new business both domestically and internationally; and we continued to innovate, supporting the acceleration of retailers' digital engagement activities, all while carefully managing our resources. The management team demonstrated their ability to be agile in the face of a global pandemic, rapidly implementing cash management procedures and new marketing initiatives. Throughout the pandemic, great emphasis has been placed on continuous communication with clients, partners and employees and it is evident to me that the Group has emerged as a strengthened team as a result.

Of all the operational achievements in the Year, one to particularly note is the accelerated speed with which we can now take significant new clients live, as achieved with our two new international clients going live in just a few months following contract signing. This puts the Group on a strong footing to accelerate growth as new customers join the platform. Importantly, the successful go-live of these two new international customers means we now have flagship clients to act as footholds for expansion into new geographies, supported by our teams in the UK.

The Year has also underlined the ability of the AIR platform to cater to the requirements of significant retailers, demonstrated by the platform's speed and scale of handling transaction volumes. Some of the world's largest retailers have chosen Eagle Eye because they can be assured that they have the best in class transaction platform which is needed to match their growing AI capabilities.  

With a growing number of flagship customers in new geographies, I am confident in our ability to continue to grow our share of the global digital loyalty and promotions market.

Financial Results

Group revenue increased to £20.4m (2019: £16.9m) despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and recurring revenues increased to 73% of Group revenues (2019: 71%). The Group generated adjusted EBITDA of £3.3m, an increase of 359% on the prior year (2019: £0.7m), ahead of revised market expectations, reflecting the growth in revenues combined with a continued focus on managing the cost base, releasing investment into the business in line with revenue growth. The focus of the management team on costs, spend and cash management delivered a significantly improved cash performance in the Year. The Group closed the Year with a net cash position of £1.5m (30 June 2019: net debt position of £(1.2)m). The Group benefited from approximately £2.2m of COVID-19 related cash management measures and prudent working capital management, resulting in a cash inflow of £2.8m (2019: outflow £1.6m) for the Year, which will partly unwind in FY21. The Board is confident that the Group continues to have sufficient headroom to support its existing growth plans within its £5m banking facility, which has been extended to September 2021. At the Year end, the Group had a net cash position of £1.5m giving the Group total headroom of £6.5m.

Summary

At this point in my review it is customary to thank the staff for their contribution in the Year. This year, more than any, I have observed their ability and agility to handle the challenges of COVID-19 in a manner which has been remarkable to witness and I thank them all for their hard work and dedication, both to the business and our customers. I would like to once again thank all our customers, partners, suppliers and shareholders for their continued support throughout the Year and I look forward to achieving further successes together in the future.

The impact of COVID-19 has accelerated change in the retail sector, prompting growth in digital engagement and ecommerce, and underlining the need for brands to build direct to consumer propositions. Eagle Eye's ability to provide services to help businesses acquire, connect with and retain customers and build on loyalty has never been more relevant.

I am incredibly proud of the business Eagle Eye has become, with metrics such as customer retention rates, recurring revenue and growth rates demonstrating the quality of the business. These factors, coupled with the size of its addressable market and growing customer base provide the Board with confidence in the ongoing resilience of Eagle Eye and its ability to capitalise on the long-term growth opportunity the digital transformation of retail marketing represents.

Malcolm Wall, Non-Executive Chairman

CEO's Statement

The COVID-19 pandemic has clearly had a marked impact on the global economy. However, our people responded with great agility and I believe we have emerged as a stronger company, successfully navigating the impact of lockdown on segments of our customer base and quickly implementing measures to protect our balance sheet and support our customers, while increasing our strength as a team. I am incredibly pleased with how we have responded and more confident than ever in our ability to thrive.

Our growing number of Tier 1 customers demonstrates our ability to deliver for enterprise level clients. We have growing proof of the performance of the AIR platform and its unique ability to deliver leading loyalty and promotions programmes for some of the largest retailers in the world.  Alongside our long-standing Tier 1 customers in the UK, we can now point to an increasing number of international clients, proving we have the means to enter new geographies and capture an increased share of the expanding global digital loyalty and promotions market.

Market opportunity

The impact of the global pandemic has seen the acceleration of the shift to digital for both consumers and retailers, as demonstrated by a 28 percent increase in Global eCommerce sales in June 2020 compared to June 2019 (ACI Worldwide Research). Pure play online retailers and omnichannel retailers have seen significant growth during this time, while traditional bricks and mortar retailers have struggled. It is now clear that having an omnichannel strategy that harnesses this shift in buying behaviour will be key to retailers building resilience and maximising recovery.  

However, according to a recent report by McKinsey* into retail behaviour, a critical component for delivering a great omnichannel experience is being able to deliver hyperlocal and personalised experiences, both in store and online. To achieve this, retailers need to be able to track a customer across all interactions, with an offer engine sitting behind each of the channels, bringing them all together. Our AIR digital marketing platform provides retailers with a better, simpler and highly efficient way to achieve genuine omnichannel personalisation by providing a consolidated view of each customer, tracking every customer interaction, connecting to the Point of Sale (the till) and all other customer touchpoints thus enabling retailers to deliver the best data-derived and personalised action to each customer. The importance of this can be seen in the same report, which found that during the lockdown, between 12% and 21% of survey respondents said they switched to brands that sent them relevant messages or promotions via their preferred channel.

We operate in large, global markets: Promotions; Loyalty; and Gift, which benefit both from inherent growth and the ongoing conversion to digital. Examples of the level of growth forecast by industry research houses in these markets are:

·      31% growth in the total value of mobile coupons redeemed between 2020 - 2023, to USD 67.6 billion (Digital Loyalty Programmes: Market Trends, Credit Cards & Retailer Readiness 2020-2025, Juniper Research, 6 July 2020)

·      23.3% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) in the global loyalty management market between 2020 - 2025, to USD 11.4 billion (Mordor Intelligence, Loyalty management market - growth, trends and forecasts (2020 - 2025), January 2020)

·      13% CAGR in the global gift cards market between 2020 - 2023, to USD 1.4 trillion (Persistence Market Research, 28 April 2020)

This data illustrates that the addressable market for Eagle Eye is significant and growing and, therefore, even relatively small increases in market share would be transformational for our business.  

* Retail reimagined: The new era for customer experience - Periscope by McKinsey August 2020

Delivering against all elements of our growth strategy

I am pleased to report the following progress across all four elements of our growth strategy:

1."Win, Transact and Deepen"

Our customer strategy is to:

·      'Win': bring more customers on to the Eagle Eye AIR platform;

·      'Transact': drive higher redemption and interaction volumes through the platform; and

·      'Deepen': encourage our customers to adopt more of our product portfolio as they become more adept at digital marketing.

Our high level of customer retention means that each new customer win significantly adds to our growth prospects, with revenue from our largest revenue-generating customers typically increasing by a multiple of over three times by the end of their third year on the AIR platform, through both use of the platform and the addition of new services. This trend has now been consistently exhibited by key clients for over five years.

Win

The Year saw an increased win rate, both in the UK and in new geographies, resulting in an uplift in "Win" related revenue. New customers secured included The Warehouse Group (NZ), Southeastern Grocers (USA), and new UK customers, including Pret a Manger, TGI Fridays, Mowgli Street Food and London Theatres Direct. These new customer implementations contributed to revenue growth in the Year, and importantly provide an increased base for future expected growth as these customers increase their use of the AIR platform.

Transact

The technical strength of the AIR platform and its growing reach can be seen in the strong growth in redemptions and interactions ('AIR volumes') in the Year, growing by 140% year-on-year to 2.1bn (FY19: 0.9bn). This growth was primarily driven by growth in loyalty transactions following the successful launch of new programmes and deepening of existing accounts, but also reflecting growth in all other types of transactions.

Brands & Audiences

The AIR platform is also used by brands to run campaign activations across our growing Retailer, Operator and Audience Network. While this element of the business was impacted by the COVID-19 lockdown, overall the revenue from branded drinks campaigns grew 26% to £0.8m (FY19: £0.7m), delivered over just the first nine months of the year, driven by both the increased number of brands and increased average value per campaign. Brand campaigns run in the Year included Guinness' Passbook campaign, Greene King's Icebreaker campaign and Lost Lager by Brewdog.

We have increased the attractiveness of the AIR platform to Brands through the implementation of our "Connected Campaigns" proposition, incorporating a light touch integration with an operator's Point of Sale system to allow smaller operators to join the platform very quickly. As a result, the number of hospitality venues on the platform increased by over 1,000 during lockdown, to over 7,000 by the end of June 2020. This considerably increased number of venues creates a more attractive platform for Brands to exploit.  

The other element of our 'Transact' strategy is our Audience partners, who include affiliate networks and membership groups. During the Year, we signed several new partners and saw the addition of the first Affiliate network, Tradedoubler, which alone provides our clients with the ability to disseminate their offers and promotions far wider than ever before, to over 180,000 additional publishers.

Deepen

We saw continued growth in recurring revenues in the Year, as existing clients increased their use of the AIR platform. The key driver of this is our Tier 1 customer segment where we have seen growth from both the increased use of the platform for promotional activity and the greater take-up of new services by Tier 1 customers. The Year also saw several Tier 1 customers move from implementation to successful go-live on the AIR platform, driving a strong increase in recurring, transactional revenues.

Our long term contract customer churn rate by value remains very low at 0.9% (FY19: 0.8%) with several multi-year contract renewals taking place, including Sainsbury's, ASDA and JD Sports, demonstrating the stickiness of the AIR platform.

Supporting our clients through the COVID-19 lock-down

The Group has increased its relevance and proven its ability to rapidly innovate by launching initiatives to support our clients in the face of COVID-19. These included the launch of a Text and Trace service within hours of the UK Government announcing the need for hospitality operators to collect guest contact details, which is now live in over 3,000 locations including Greene King, Marstons and Extra Motorway Services. We have also introduced new app-based click & collect and pay at table solutions to help operators provide a contactless customer experience. We were pleased to donate the AIR platform to power the UK's Grand Outdoor Summer Café campaign, a fundraising initiative to thank Key Workers for their huge contribution during these unprecedented times.

2. Innovation and the AIR platform

Innovation

One of our core values is innovation. Over the course of the Year, we have continued to enhance our AIR platform, working in collaboration with our clients to ensure that our technology continues to deliver to meet their, and their consumers', ever-changing needs.

Better data: A key focus has been on developing the platform to further strengthen our capability to deliver real-time hyper-personalisation for our clients. We have invested in building standard integrations to third party analytics providers to streamline the process from data-driven insight into digital execution.

Additional channels: We have launched our new, personalised Message At Till capability which we believe will soon have many innovative use cases associated to it, based on the different ways in which businesses will deploy the technology.

Personalised loyalty: Our clients wanted to implement new strategies to enable their consumers to personalise the way in which they could be rewarded for their loyalty. We, therefore, developed a new Reward Bank feature which enables consumers to select from a range of available products or services for which they can exchange their earned loyalty points.

ESG: We worked in collaboration with our clients to support Charity Donations, a feature which allows a customer to select from available charities to whom they can donate the value of their loyalty points. We expect this feature to develop and become more and more popular as our clients' ESG initiatives continue to come to the fore.

Coalition schemes: B2B partnerships beyond charities have also become more important to our clients, with many businesses looking to develop their own ecosystem with their loyalty currency at its heart. To support this, we have developed a new and streamlined way to facilitate partnerships in the platform, enabling scheme partners to run incentives which reward participating consumers in the scheme owners' currency, with no involvement from the scheme owner required.

AIR Platform

Underpinning the development work highlighted above, are the significant improvements we have continued to make to our underlying technology. During the Year, we drove a 30% improvement in speed and responsiveness of our platform by taking advantage of new tools and technology available to us through our partnership with Google. We have developed a new process for deploying hundreds of millions of hyper-personalised offers per week and reducing the offer allocation process from 12 hours to 40 minutes. We will continue to invest in this foundational work which is core to ensuring that AIR is the most scalable and robust loyalty and promotions platform on the market, maintaining our position as a technology leader, which is a pre-requisite for successfully serving Tier 1 clients.

In the Year, we delivered new Point of Sale integrations to Oracle Simphony and Oracle Micros RES, expanding our international addressable market in hospitality.

Our move to GCP has been completed, successfully moving all our AIR platforms in all our geographies to GCP. We have seen excellent benefits from the move and will continue to build on the tools and technologies that the move to GCP enables.

We are now live with AIR in the UK, Canada, USA and Australia and without the move to GCP the opening up of new geographies would have been significantly more expensive and would not have been possible in the time period. GCP allows us to activate new infrastructure in a matter of hours and at a relatively small size, with the ability to grow the capacity as required by wins in the region. This gives us the ultimate flexibility to grow compute power as we sign up new customers and as our existing customers require it.

Thanks to the implementation of GCP and our cloud transformation journey, we no longer need to manage hardware and datacentres as we used to and so have embraced the world of DevOps and agile platform management to run a 24/7 global operations team and via the use of tools such as New Relic, we are able to monitor and react to issues in real-time before they affect our customers. 

We are upskilling our technical teams by putting employees through the Google Cloud Certification process as part of their personal development.  The skills gained from these accreditations will enable us to gain more hands-on experience and a deeper understanding of Google Cloud products.

As we move into 2021, we will be implementing further changes including the introduction of site reliability engineering in order to be more scalable, automated, reliable, standardised and secure.

3. International growth

We have started to prosecute our international growth strategy in the Year, winning new customers, taking them live in significantly reduced timescales and providing us with a gateway to new territories. Our new agile methodologies have enabled us to supplement our local teams by our global resource pool, enabling us to open up these geographies in a cost-efficient and scalable manner.

We now have a small team on the ground in Australia, supporting The Warehouse Group of New Zealand, and our North American and UK teams have successfully secured and gone live with our first US customer, Southeastern Grocers.

US

Since the signing of a five-year contract with Southeastern Grocers, Inc., a top 20 grocer in the US, in December 2019, we have made rapid progress to deploy the AIR platform and begin a multi-phased implementation. Nine media channels will be enabled, with the first channel, Message at Till which is a coupon on a receipt, going live in June 2020 within six months of contract signing.  Revenues from this contract will continue to grow in future years, as the number of live channels and transactions flowing through the AIR platform increase.

Powerful collaborations

Having initially secured the contract alongside our first US partner, News America Marketing, we are now delivering this contract alongside additional delivery partners Ecrebo, the receipt marketing technology provider and dunnhumby, a global leader in customer data analytics. These three companies represent powerful, relevant relationships to optimise our expansion into the US. Combining these relationships with our own, direct marketing activities, we believe provides us with the right mix to capture more of what is the world's largest promotions and loyalty market and we are encouraged by the increasing number of opportunities entering our sales pipeline.

Australasia & Asia Pacific

The Warehouse Group, one of the largest retailing groups in New Zealand, has moved to the pilot phase of its digital customer engagement and community give back programme following a team member trial. The pilot programme launched in its largest brand, The Warehouse, in June 2020, commencing the generation of transaction revenues at that time.  With one customer secured and a team on the ground in Australia, we are now exploring opportunities to target the Tier 1 retail market in the wider Asia Pacific region, where we have identified a good level of enterprise level prospects.

Moving forward, our strategy for international expansion will continue to be centred around securing a landmark client in a new geography to spearhead expansion into that region. Where possible, we will utilise already existing resources to support new geographies, until the relevance of our offering to that market has been proven and the profitable viability of market specific investment confirmed.

4. "Better, Simpler, Cheaper"

While investing in innovation and growing the business, we simultaneously look for inherent productivity and efficiencies coming from the scale of what we do. The relevance of this ethos came to the fore at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic when the agility of the organisation enabled us to swiftly implement home working and the change of working practices required to ensure its successful execution. The proof of this can be seen both in the continued successes with our Tier 1 one customer implementations as well as the strong financials we have reported.

We have now implemented the agile methodology, not only within software development, but across the business. At the start of the Year, we introduced our concept of being a Team of Teams, to help facilitate faster decision making and swifter response to changes in our end markets. As we expand geographically this will allow the business to grow and flourish.

The business is now split between functions that form the core 'backbone' of the business, such as infrastructure and security, finance and HR, and other functions whose activity and location is assigned each quarter, depending on the business requirements at the time, such as customer wins and implementation. The benefits of this model mean that we can remain a lean organisation but are able to support customers across multiple geographies and invest in line with, rather than ahead of, revenue growth, ensuring that we are efficiently using our capital resources.

The benefits of our migration to GCP, our lead "Better, Simpler, Cheaper" initiative from 2019, can be seen in the 140% growth in transaction volumes through the platform, only resulting in a 6% increase in infrastructure costs, to £4.4m (FY19: £4.1m).

People

We have set ourselves the goal of being a great place to work and to create an environment where our people can flourish. We continue to place investment in our people at the heart of what we do, providing them with training and tools to be the best they can be.

We passionately believe that it is the values of an organisation that sets them apart. Our values of teamwork, passion, excellence, fun, integrity and innovation are summarised at Eagle Eye as being Purple behaviours. It is the Purpleness of our team that has enabled us to cope as well as we have in the face of COVID-19. Keeping values fresh and top of mind in an organisation is a full-time job and to this end this Year we have established a Values Committee to recognise and reward individuals and teams who display "Purple" behaviour.

Increased communication has been vital during the Year and we have put in place our "Tea with Teams" weekly company updates, Sales & Operations meetings to streamline the hand off between the two functions and quarterly senior leadership meetings to align and empower the senior team on the strategy of the business and enable appropriate resource allocation.

Eagle Eye has always prided itself on fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace and culture in line with its strong and clearly defined values. This Year we have encouraged employees to create Employee Resource Groups and so far we have two, one for mental health and another for racial diversity.

COVID-19

We continue to monitor the impact of COVID-19, reviewing and updating our business continuity plans accordingly. We have proven our ability to respond to the immediate changes thrust upon our clients and ourselves, but we will not be complacent. We will continue to closely monitor the health of all of our client relationships, implement strong cash management practices and invest in line with growth.

COVID-19 saw many of the Group's Food and Beverage (F&B) and non-grocery retail clients in the UK shut from mid-March until early July, impacting circa 10% of the Group's revenue base prior to the impact of COVID-19. The primary impact of this was on transactional revenue but there was also an impact on the continued deepening of client accounts that we would traditionally see.

Following the lifting of lockdown, we have seen a partial recovery in our F&B and Non-Grocery retail revenues; however, we remain cognisant that we may enter new lockdown restrictions at any point. We are conscious that whilst these could affect revenue, we are confident that we have the right structure and agility to respond to changes in the external environment. We are continuing to generate new business opportunities.

Outlook

In spite of the challenging global outlook, we have continued to make excellent progress against our strategic objectives this Year, delivering leading loyalty and promotions programmes for some of the largest retailers in the world. Our people have been outstanding during these challenging times, and I am assured of our ability to respond to whatever may lie ahead.

We will continue to invest in our people, product development, sales and marketing, and in new geographies during the year ahead, whilst carefully managing the business and cost base. This will enable us to capitalise on accelerated digital transformation in the retail sector, as well as sustain the momentum we have gained in the US and Australasia.

The first few months of the new financial year have begun well, in line with the Board's expectations, but we must of course be cognisant of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and possible delay to corporate decision-making and impact on our leisure and non-grocery retail clients particularly. We anticipate revenues from our existing clients to grow during the year, as new phases of their programmes are implemented, and we have a focused strategy to capture more of the Tier 1 market.

We have made great progress on those things that we can control and responded with great agility to those things outside our control. I am confident that this will stand us in remarkably good stead whatever the future may hold. The business is in better shape than it was pre-COVID-19 and I am excited by the opportunity ahead.

Tim Mason, Chief Executive Officer 

Financial Review

Key Performance Indicators

⁽¹⁾ Adjusted EBITDA excludes share-based payment charges along with depreciation, amortisation, interest and tax from the measure of profit and is reconciled to the GAAP measure of loss before taxation in note 5.

⁽²⁾ Net cash/(debt) is cash and cash equivalents less borrowings.

Group results

Revenue

Revenue growth for the Group was 21% for the Year (FY19: 23%). Half on half growth was achieved during the Year despite revenue being held back by the impact of COVID-19 on the Group's F&B clients and some of its High Street retail clients. Revenue growth of 3% was achieved in H2 20 compared to H1 20, which itself grew by 13% from H2 19.

COVID-19 saw many of the Group's clients in the UK shut from mid-March 2020 until early July 2020, impacting circa 10% of the Group's revenue base prior to the impact of COVID-19. The primary impact of this was on transactional revenue but there was also an impact on the continued deepening of client accounts that we would traditionally see.

Revenue growth was driven by important wins during the Year, both in the UK and new international territories, deepening of existing relationships across all sectors and successful contract renewals, including for Asda and Sainsbury's. AIR volumes, a key measure of usage of the AIR platform, grew by 140% year-on-year to 2.1bn for the Year (FY19: 0.9bn). This was driven by Tier 1 usage and increased volumes through existing F&B and other retail clients, in part driven by a 26% increase in Brand and Audience partner revenue, despite brand opportunities being shut down for the last quarter of the Year by COVID-19.

Overall, revenue from the AIR platform represents 94% of total revenue, £19.2m (FY19: 94%, £15.9m). SMS messaging revenue, which represents the other 6% of Group revenue, grew by 25% to £1.3m (FY19: £1.0m), primarily due to increased revenue seen from clients where the Group is integrated not only for their High Street stores but also for their eCommerce offering. The Group is also using its SMS messaging platform to support clients in following the UK Government's Track & Trace guidelines post Year end, but overall SMS is expected to continue to represent a decreasing proportion of the business in future years.

Overall, £14.9m of revenue was generated from subscription fees and transactions over the network, representing 73% of total revenue (FY19: 71%, £12.0m). The balance, £5.5m, relates to implementation fees for new customers or new services for existing customers and represents 27% of total revenue (FY19: 29%, £4.9m). The increase in implementation fees primarily reflects new contract wins in the US and the UK.

Gross profit

Gross profit grew 21% to £19.1m (FY19: £15.8m) and gross margin increased to 94% (FY19: 93%). This improvement in margin reflects the maintenance of AIR platform gross margin at 97% (FY19: 97%) offset by the lower margin SMS messaging business which continues to account for only 2% of gross profit (FY19: 2%).

Costs of sales include the cost of sending SMS messages, revenue share agreements and outsourced, bespoke development work. All internal resource costs are recognised within operating costs, net of capitalised development and contract costs.

Adjusted operating expenses

FY20 has seen us build on the foundations laid in the prior year for running the business in a "Better, Simpler, Cheaper" way, exercising agility in how we manage the cost base, whilst continuing to invest in growth. Growth in adjusted operating expenses has been limited to just 5% at £15.8m (FY19: £15.0m). This cost represents sales and marketing, product development (net of capitalised costs), operational IT, general and administration costs.

The increase in staff costs to £12.1m (FY19: £11.2m) reflected standard annual pay awards and increased commission/bonus reflecting increased new customer win rate and the Group's strong EBITDA performance. Average headcount for the Year was 139 (FY19: 138). We continue to invest in the product and sales and marketing; within staff costs, gross expenditure on product development remained constant at £4.0m (FY19: £4.0m) and sales and marketing spend was £2.9m (FY19: £2.3m).

The successful migration of our environments to GCP was completed in August 2019. Transaction volumes grew by 140%, new infrastructure investment was required to support new international clients and further environments for staging and development were added, to help enhance the scalability and stability of the AIR platform. The successful migration to GCP meant that infrastructure costs increased by just 6% to £4.4m (FY19: £4.1m). Reflecting the Group's agile investment strategy and cost control measures during COVID-19, marketing, travel and administration costs were 15% lower than in FY19 at £2.1m (FY19: £2.5m).

Capitalised product development costs were £2.4m (FY19: £2.2m), whilst amortisation of capitalised development costs was £2.0m (FY19: £1.7m). Contract costs (including costs to obtain contracts and contract fulfilment costs), recognised as assets under IFRS 15, were £0.5m (FY19: £0.4m) and amortisation of contract costs was £0.5m (FY19: £0.3m).

Adjusted EBITDA

The growth in revenue and tight control of costs, particularly through the COVID-19 period, has resulted in a significant increase in adjusted EBITDA which is up 359% at £3.3m (FY19: £0.7m) for the Year. To provide a better guide to the underlying business performance, adjusted EBITDA excludes share-based payment charges along with depreciation, amortisation, interest and tax from the measure of profit. The GAAP measure of operating loss before interest and tax was just short of break-even at £0.04m loss (FY19: £2.5m loss) reflecting the EBITDA profit achieved in the Year and a decrease in the non-cash share-based payment charge to £0.5m (FY19: £0.8m), reflecting the impact of COVID-19 on future performance related vesting assumptions, offset by increased depreciation and amortisation costs.

EPS and dividend

Finance expense was maintained at £0.3m (FY19: £0.3m) reflecting utilisation of the Group's revolving loan facility during the Year, prior to it being fully repaid.

Following the Group's move to EBITDA profitability, a deferred tax asset has been recognised utilising a proportion of the historic losses brought forward in the UK. This, and the continued successful R&D tax claims, partially offsets overseas tax charges of £0.3m.

As a result, loss after taxation was £0.5m (FY19: £2.4m) and reported basic and diluted loss per share improved by 81% to 1.77p (FY19: loss per share 9.27p).

The Board does not feel it appropriate at this time to commence paying dividends and continues to invest in its growth strategy.

Group Statement of Financial Position

The Group had net assets of £4.4m at 30 June 2020 (30 June 2019: £4.3m), including capitalised intellectual property of £3.7m (30 June 2019: £3.3m). The movement in net assets reflects the exercise of share options during the Year offset by loss after tax in the Year.

Non-current assets increased by £0.1m following recognition of a deferred tax asset reflecting expected utilisation of tax losses brought forward in future periods. Current assets increased by £1.0m primarily due to higher revenue in the Year. Liabilities increased by £1.0m due to increased payment terms with suppliers and tax authorities in the light of COVID-19 offset by the repayment of the Group's revolving credit facility.

Cashflow and net cash

The Group ended the Year with net cash of £1.5m (30 June 2019: net debt of £1.2m) being better than the Board's expectations. Overall net cash inflow for the Year was £2.8m (FY19: outflow of £1.6m).

The main components to the net cash inflow were the operating cash inflow of £6.1m (FY19: inflow of £1.6m), reflecting the EBITDA profit of £3.3m (FY19: £0.7m), a working capital inflow of £2.6m (FY19: £0.4m), primarily as a result of COVID-19 deferrals, and net tax receipts of £0.2m (FY19: £0.5m), offset by capital investment in the AIR platform of £2.4m (FY19: £2.2m), payments in respect of leases £0.3m (FY19: £0.3m) and interest due on the Group's revolving credit facility with Barclays £0.2m (FY19: £0.2m).

The Group has made use of a number of COVID-19 linked schemes in order to manage its working capital, including the deferral of VAT and PAYE in the UK. Together with revised payment terms agreed with suppliers, this has allowed the Group to offer extended payment terms to some of its F&B sector clients who have been hardest hit by COVID-19. The net impact of these schemes and extended terms was c.£2.0m at 30 June 2020, which will partly unwind during FY21 in line with agreed plans.

Banking facility

The Group has remained comfortably within its banking covenants which relate to available headroom and adjusted EBITDA performance. Following the Year end, the Group has extended the term of its revolving loan facility with Barclays Bank PLC to expire on 30 September 2021. The revolving loan facility is structured to be for a minimum amount of £5.0m, increasing to £5.7m for part of H2 21 to ensure sufficient flexibility in the facility in the event of a second COVID-19 wave. The Group's gross cash of £1.5m (FY19: £1.5m) and the fully undrawn £5.0m facility (FY19: £2.4m undrawn) gives the Group £6.5m of headroom, which the Directors believe is sufficient to support the Group's existing growth plans.  

Consolidated statement of total comprehensive income

for the Year ended 30 June 2020