The fuse is lit for Bango

Bango, the mobile web payments and analytics company, today reported half year results which reflect the company’s greater focus on the opportunity created by the growth in the number of smartphones. Reported revenue was down to £4.54m (compared with £5.7m for H1 2012) as customers switched to an agency model and EBITDA losses increased. Importantly though, end user spend through the Bango platform was up 74% compared with the last 6 months of 2012 and promises continued growth.

The company has made substantial progress in building partnerhsips. This includes signing deals with Mozilla (as reported in our 7^th August HotView), Facebook, Telefonica and Google Play. Over 100 Mobile Network Operators world-wide and their 1.2bn subscribers can now charge their purchases of digital content and services direct to their mobile phone bill via the Bango platform.

Digital content sales have been dominated by Apple, but other apps and content stores such as Google Play are growing rapidly in importance. This will boost end user revenue, where Bango predicts a gross margin of 2-5%. The company’s business model appears scaleable, with data infrastructure in place for a 100-fold volume increase. Further expansion into the larger emerging markets of Brazil and India is on the cards. An analytics business is also generating a growing revenue stream, based on Bango’s experience of digital buying trends and customer behaviour.

The share price has been becalmed as investors awaited hard evidence of the potential, but the outlook is now clearer and we can expect additional end user spend to boost the bottom line as volume builds from the recently signed agreements. Positive EBITDA may still be some way off, but Bango has the business model, partnerships and infrastructure in place to be the leading platform world-wide for carrier billing.

Posted by Peter Roe at '09:25' - Tagged: mobility   payments