(BGO) Bango

19 March 2013

Embargoed until 07:00

BANGO PLC   

("Bango")

Final Results for the nine months ended 31 December 2012

Bango (AIM: BGO), the mobile web payments and analytics company, today announces its Final Results for the nine months ended 31 December 2012.

Bango has aligned its financial year end to the calendar year, resulting in a nine-month trading period, from 1 April 2012 to 31 December 2012, with no interim report produced for the period ending 30 September 2012.

Financial Highlights for the nine months ended 31 December 2012  

·     Turnover for the nine months of £7.4m (12 months to 31 March 2012: £15.6m), reflecting the shorter accounting period and the managed phase out of the feature phone business

·     Gross Profit for the nine months of £1.58m (12 months to 31 March 2012: £2.29m)

·     Total loss after tax of £2.4m (12 months to 31 March 2012: loss of £0.93m)

o Technology and personnel investments to support the continued growth of the business

o Increased spend to prepare for the forthcoming release of BlackBerry 10

·      Raised £3.25m from existing shareholders in June 2012

Results for the year do not include any material income from the agreements signed with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, MasterCard and Facebook, but do include costs relating to the establishment of these relationships.

Operational Highlights for the nine months ended 31 December 2012

·    Bango holds over 200 million billable identities, total reach exceeding 1 billion mobile phone users and is connected to 90+ mobile operators across 5 continents

·    Strong momentum with industry leaders:

o Rollout with Facebook across USA, UK, France and Germany

o First Google Play operator billing live in December 2012 with Telstra in Australia

o Microsoft's Windows Phone Store integration underway in initial countries

·    Analytics transaction volumes continued to grow at increasing rates

·    Major platform upgrade to improve capacity and security

·    Product development including new releases of Bango Payments and Bango Analytics 

·    Management team strengthened with recruitment of CFO and COO

Post Period Highlights

·    Global Framework Agreement with Telefónica Digital in January 2013

·    Powering BlackBerry with 50 operators worldwide; BlackBerry10 launched in January 2013

·     Raised £6.5m from institutional investors in February 2013 to strengthen balance sheet and take advantage of developing opportunities in emerging markets and further business development with major mobile network operators 

Ray Anderson, Chief Executive Officer of Bango, commented:

"Having become the established industry mobile operator billing platform of choice, Bango has a central position within the smartphone marketplace, enabled through its innovative and superior payments and analytics products. Key to these products is the powerful and unique Bango Platform, which is capable of supporting significant volumes of transactions, and is a platform in the truest sense in that each partner benefits from the contributions of others; identifying hundreds of millions of users and maximizing the number of one-click payments.

"The period saw much commercial progress across the business including the initial roll-out of services across many geographies with industry leaders such as Facebook, Google Play, and integration with Microsoft's Windows Phone Store. In addition, the fundraising completed in February 2013, provides Bango with the resources to move forward in developing the opportunities presenting themselves in large emerging markets.

"The Board is confident of the many opportunities presenting themselves in its growing marketplace, and expects to see continued growth in end user activity driven by increased mobile operator connections alongside increased roll-out of services with major industry names."

Contact Details:

About Bango

In the era of mobile technology, collecting payments has emerged as a central and complex challenge. Bango (AIM: BGO) powers payment and analytics on the mobile web, providing users with a massively smooth payment experience.

Bango's pervasive presence across the web creates a platform effect for partners, identifying hundreds of millions of users and maximizing the number of one-click payments. Partners who plug into Bango include Facebook, BlackBerry World, Windows Phone Store, Amazon and major mobile brands including CNN, Cartoon Network and EA Mobile. Visit: www.bango.com 

Chairman's Statement

During the nine month period, Bango's industry leading mobile operator billing platform has become the technology of choice for leading mobile operators, the world's largest app stores and major content publishers for the collection of payments from web connected mobile device users.

The Bango Payments Platform is integrated with mobile operator networks to enable easy collection of payments from more than 1 billion phone users around the world. This achieves a significant sales uplift compared with credit cards alone, one Bango believes is further amplified by its unique identification capability allowing one-click billing across network and Wi-Fi environments. Bango believes it is this demonstrable value and important contribution to the mobile internet ecosystem that will ensure it remains at the forefront of the mobile internet payments market.

During the period Bango started to deploy services to collect payments for Facebook and Google, and announced relationships with Microsoft and Telefónica. The relationship with BlackBerry expanded to cover more than 90 mobile operators in 45 countries in preparation for the launch of BlackBerry 10 following the period end. Whilst operator billing remains in the early stages of adoption Bango continue to see high potential in the market.

Bango also continued to drive a shift away from legacy feature phone business since the decision to focus the Bango Platform and marketing on smartphones in 2010. Revenues through Bango's new smartphone app store partners grew to account for over 77% of end user spend in December 2012, with growth continuing into January and February 2013.

Bango serves a large and growing market. Revenues from mobile content, monetized through direct operator billing, is expected to rise from $2bn in 2012 to more than $13bn by 2017, according to Juniper Research. The mobile application download market in particular is expected to show rapid growth; Gartner predicts that by 2014 revenues will reach $58 billion, up from $4.2 billion in 2009.

The Bango team operationally continues to deliver, and in order to support a significant scaling-up in future transaction volumes, Bango has continued to augment operations. Bango was delighted to strengthen its management by recruiting Gerry Tucker as CFO and David Keeling as COO. 

I would like to thank all of Bango's employees and partners for their unswerving efforts to make Bango a key player in this exciting, fast-growing, global industry. I would also pass on all our thanks to our investors for their continued support of Bango.

David Sear

Chairman

CEO's Statement 

Introduction

Bango enables users to quickly and easily pay for digital content, services and virtual goods on their smartphone. Bango has been a pioneer of mobile payments since 1999, and over the last two years established itself as the industry leading technology and partner of choice.

Bango has built a unique and powerful payments platform, which enables its partners such as Facebook, BlackBerry, Amazon, Microsoft, and others, to provide content and collect payments from consumers by integrating the billing systems of more than 90 mobile operators around the world into a common platform.

Bango reduces the cost and time to market and also provides a superior user experience to enable more sales than a business could get by a simple direct connection to one or more billing systems. The Bango powered payment process benefits from a user's previous interactions across multiple content providers - which a content provider operating alone cannot use. Bango also provides automated settlement, currency and tax management, risk management and reporting systems to reliably collect payments for content providers and powerful analytics to monitor user behavior and marketing.

Overview

Bango has been successfully executing on its plan to support a significant scaling-up in future transaction volumes by investing in its management and operational teams, data centers and innovative payments platform and analytics products.

In the nine month period to 31 December 2012, Bango made significant commercial progress with many of its industry leading partners, such as the roll-out with Facebook across the USA, UK, France and Germany. Important progress has also been made with Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) direct billing integrations which now exceed 90, expanding Bango's reach to more than 1 billion mobile phone users. Dozens of additional integrations are underway to expand this already substantial billing reach. On 17 January 2013, Bango was delighted to announce a global mobile payments partnership with Telefónica. The partnership will integrate Telefónica's global platform, BlueVia, with the Bango Payments Platform.

Facebook

Bango provides Facebook with mobile web MNO billing as part of an improved mobile payments flow that enables Facebook's mobile web users to easily purchase digital content without using premium SMS messages or being restricted by the limitations of credit cards. Facebook users can enjoy frictionless operator billing, paying on their phone, without entering personal details.

The relationship with Facebook was initially announced in February 2012 and Bango has been pleased with the deployment to date; the Facebook service was launched in the USA in June 2012, the UK in June 2012, Germany in September 2012 and France in November 2012.

In late 2012 Facebook began trialling a paid service called Promoted Posts. This allows Facebook users to 'push' a message posted on Facebook to a wider audience by paying a few dollars. The payment can be quickly and conveniently charged to the users' phone bill through Bango, without disrupting the posting experience. Once a post has been sponsored, Facebook can advise how many friends saw the post, and indicate the increase as a result of promoting it.

Google Play

In December 2012, Bango announced that its first Google Play operator billing integration had been launched with Telstra in Australia. Google Play delivers music, books, movies and apps straight to hundreds of millions of users around the world. Bango expects to deliver further operator connections into Google Play in the coming year, as Android market share continues to grow Mobile Network Operators are increasingly approaching Bango to use the Bango Payments Platform to connect their billing systems to Google Play for Android.

BlackBerry

BlackBerry was Bango's first major app store partner, which launched in September 2010. BlackBerry World now uses Bango direct billing connections to collect payments from more than 50 MNO's in North America, Europe, South America and Asia.

On 30 January 2013, BlackBerry launched BlackBerry 10 (BB10), a new smartphone and tablet platform that improves usability. The devices will be offered as full touchscreen handsets, or as keyboard plus touchscreen, maintaining the appeal of BlackBerry for messaging. Bango has worked extensively with BlackBerry during the period to prepare for the BB10 launch.

Additionally, BB10 increases the number of apps available to BlackBerry users. Based on information from BlackBerry about the number of apps available on BB10, additional content types, and improvements made to the app store user interface, the Board expects the launch of BB10 to increase app sales.

Microsoft

Following the announcement of Bango's relationship with Microsoft in May 2012, Bango began integration of its platform with the Windows Phone Store. Bango is pleased to report that this process of integration is actively underway with mobile operator billing systems in three initial countries. 

MasterCard PayPass Wallet

In May 2012, MasterCard announced its relationship with Bango as a technology partner to support its new PayPass digital wallet. In the same way as a wallet holding credit cards, Bango's technology can be used to access bank credentials or pre-paid funds, enabling quick and easy payment collection from users. Mobile wallets are not currently widely used, but Bango is well positioned for when they become more popular.

Wallet providers that integrate with Bango can achieve more rapid deployment of their services to a wide range of Bango connected digital merchants. From the merchant's point of view, Bango significantly improves the user experience by presenting a wallet if the user has it, based on previous interactions or information from the wallet provider - but not presenting a payment method the user does not have.

Amazon

An agreement was signed with Amazon in December 2011 and, as expected, did not generate significant revenue during the nine month financial period. The relationship continue to develop and management is encouraged by the progress to date.

Bango Analytics

Bango Analytics provides important technical and commercial synergies; it is highly valued by customers because it provides information unavailable anywhere else. It is highly complementary with the Bango Payments Platform. Growth in transaction volumes on the analytics platform has continued at increasing rates, driven mainly by increasing numbers of mobile websites and downloaded applications using it.

Significant analytics customers include NBA, CNN, Thomson Reuters and Telefónica. Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows, HMTL5 and other platforms are all driving traffic - adding millions of users to the Bango ID database every month.

Strengthened management team

Bango has made several key hires to strengthen its capability to consistently deliver the high levels of service expected by Bango customers and partners as the business continues to grow, transaction volumes increase and Bango continues to innovate. It will also assist Bango to commercialize further opportunities that are arising.

In November 2012 Gerry Tucker was warmly welcomed to the Board as Chief Financial Officer (CFO), replacing Peter Saxton who announced his retirement after eight years with Bango in May 2012. Gerry brings extensive experience gained in leadership roles within NASDAQ listed computer games businesses, a regulated financial trading platform and in Vodafone.

David Keeling also joined Bango's senior management team as Chief Operating Officer (COO) in November 2012, following a thorough international search and selection process. David brings extensive high volume operational and global account management experience to this newly created role following 15 years in key management positions in leading mobile businesses.

Product development

Bango continually progresses its patented, industry leading and innovative technologies. Tools and frameworks are in place for technical integrations with mobile operators, the platform is highly scalable and capable of handling significant increases in volumes, and Bango has unique authentication and identification technology. The Bango Payments Platform delivers a 300% - 1,000% sales uplift compared with traditional credit card methods, and this is amplified further due to the Bango identity database, particularly for the increasing number of Wi-Fi connected users.

New releases of the Bango Payment flows technology and of the Bango Analytics product were made during the nine month period to deploy innovations and improve payment conversion rates and performance.

Following a review of future privacy and security requirements with Bango key partners and prospects, Bango developed and initiated a trial of new privacy technology that will enable Bango's partners to give their users the ability to block access to the information collected about them by Bango, in anticipation of future evolution of privacy policy best practice.

During the final quarter, a major platform refresh was installed and put into production at Bango's primary data center. Faster internet connectivity, a larger array of servers, enhanced security systems and additional storage now enable Bango's core identity server to handle the significantly higher transaction volumes - anticipated by larger partners - whilst maintaining rapid response times. These developments ensure the continual provision of excellent user experience in payment flows while gathering analytical information from apps or web pages. 

Market overview

The smartphone user base is growing fast, with the overall global smartphone market estimated to have grown by 46.9% from Q2'11 to Q2'12, with Windows Phone and Android driving the majority of this growth. Android saw in excess of 100% growth in the period, and now enjoys 68.1% of the smartphone market (Canalys, 2012).

The installed base of smartphones, as a percentage of the total mobile phone base, is now thought to be in excess of 50% and is expected to surpass 80% in Western Europe and North America by 2016. Starting from a much lower base today, the regions of APAC (developed), China, Eastern Europe and Latin America by 2016 are expected to grow to reach c. 60% (CCS Insights, 2012).

A strong theme for newer Bango partners is access to emerging markets where credit cards are less popular, and where Android and BlackBerry devices have a higher market penetration than the iPhone. Mobile operators in Colombia, Indonesia, and Egypt were integrated during the nine month period. In addition, Bango is working with major partners to connect with leading operators in Brazil and India; these are more challenging commercially but management believes they present interesting opportunities.

Global mobile app and advertising revenues grew by a CAGR of 129% from 2008 to the end of 2012, with continued growth predicted as smartphone penetration increases (KPCB, 2012).

Outlook 

Bango has a unique technology platform, extensive mobile network operator relationships and industry-leading partners at the forefront of developments in the market. Roll-outs continue across several geographies with leading partners and MNOs are continually being added to the Bango system.

Average daily spend between November 2012 and February 2013 increased by 190%, driven primarily by early activity from newly activated customers on a stable cost base. This we believe is very encouraging as an indicator of progress. 

Bango expects continued adoption of its technology by industry players with partners such as Facebook and Amazon. In addition, greater end user uptake in BlackBerry World is anticipated following the launch of the BB10 system and devices on 30 January 2013. BlackBerry World is also due to contain additional digital content outside of apps. Bango also believes that there is significant growth potential from mobile operators partnering with Bango to provide services beyond major app stores.

Furthermore, Bango believes emerging markets represent an exciting growth opportunity and is seeing increasing interest from key partners in these areas, in particular Brazil, Latin America, India and other parts of Asia. These geographies could benefit most in terms of sales uplift from the direct to mobile billing that Bango's technology enables, given that credit card use is less prevalent in these markets. 

On behalf of the Board, I would like to express my gratitude to Bango's partners and employees for their continued support. Working with mobile operators, content providers, billing companies and other commercial partners and investors, Bango looks forward to increasing success in the year ahead. 

Ray Anderson

Chief Executive Officer