Boku Inc (LON:BOKU), the world’s leading independent carrier commerce company, today provided the following unaudited trading update for the six months ended 30 June 2019.
· Group Revenue and Adjusted EBITDA* on track to meet full year expectations
· Group Revenue for H1 2019 is expected to be in the range of US$22.5 million to US$23 million (2018 US$16.9 million); representing growth in excess of 33% compared to H1 2018
· Mobile Identity is anticipated to represent between 14% and 16% of Group Revenues in H1 2019
· Total Payment Volume (“TPV”)** of US$2.3 billion in H1 2019 was 49% up on H1 2018’s US$1.5 billion
· 15.3 million Monthly Active Users (“MAU”) of the Boku platform in June 2019 (June 2018: 10.3 million), a 48% increase
· Boku Identity monitored 74 million numbers in June 2019 and 140.9 million billable transactions were processed in H1 2019 (12 million monitored in December 2018 and 70.6 million processed in H1 2018, on a proforma basis)
· US$27.8 million in Group cash at 30 June 2019 (30 June 2018: US$32.3 million). The average daily cash balance – a measure which smooths out the effect of carrier and merchant payments, was $22.2 million in June (December 2018: $24.4 million)
* Adjusted EBITDA: Adjusted for IPO costs, stock option expenses, Forex gains/losses and Exceptional items
** TPV is the US$ value of transactions processed by the Boku platform
Jon Prideaux, Boku’s CEO, commented: “I am delighted with our first half results which show Boku maturing into a multi-product company, without missing a step in our Payments business.
“With Monthly Active Users continuing to grow strongly, we are proving once again the value that Boku brings to our global digital clients. Of course, the law of large numbers dictates that Payments volumes will not continue to grow at such high percentages indefinitely, but with our significant scale driving operational gearing, the incremental revenues we generate from Payments will continue to drop straight through to EBITDA, affording us the opportunity to make ongoing investments in future growth.
“Our first such investment, Boku Identity, is off to a flying start and yet we have barely begun to realise the full potential of this new venture. Having acquired Danal Inc, now fully integrated as Boku Identity, at the beginning of the year, the first half of 2019 has been focused on setting ourselves up for sustainable global expansion in what is a new and emerging market. We expect this progress on Identity to continue and accelerate in the second half.
“Identity is not the only innovation we are pursuing. Our recently announced partnership with Grab in South East Asia demonstrates that there is plenty of potential to grow our Payments business through partnerships with mobile wallets and other alternative payment methods.
“I am hugely excited by the pipeline of opportunities that we have created in both Payments and Identity and I look forward to providing further updates as the year progresses.
“We maintain our full year guidance for revenues and adjusted EBITDA, with the normal seasonal bias and further scale up in identity revenues expected in H2 2019.”
