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Much as presaged, multi-channel marketing software company SmartFocus appears to have made it past the finishing line with revenues and profits ahead of expectations. Headline revenues (to 31st Dec.) grew by 17% to £13.9m with what seems to be just a small tailwind from currency rates. Recurring revenues grew slower, at 12%, which reduced their contribution from 66% to 63% of the total. This belies an increase in the number of clients using SmartFocus’ hosted services, which now exceeds 40.
The profit story is much improved, with operating profits up by 80%, expanding margins from 4.4% in 2009 to 6.8%. This is still rather muted for a software play, especially one still heavily geared to ‘on-premise’ installations. Unfortunately there’s little disclosure in the prelims statement so we’ll have to wait for the annual report to take a peek under the covers.
Oddly there’s no confirmation (or otherwise) as to whether interim CEO, Curt Bloom, is to remain in post for the long haul. Founding CEO, Chris Underhill, stepped down last October (see SmartFocus CEO leaving on a high) and left the business at the end of the year. But all in all, you can’t really complain about a more than doubling of EPS (to 58p) and a slew of new marquee clients, indicating that SmartFocus seems to be hitting the spot with its products and doing a creditable job at managing growth.
UPDATE
Our headline turned out to be more appropriate than we imagined! We have just heard that SmartFocus is to be acquired by private equity held Emailvision! More later.
