4GLOBAL (LON:4GBL), a UK-based data, services and software company focused on major sporting events and the promotion and measurement of physical activity, has announced its audited final results for the year ended 31 March 2023.
Headline results for the year to 31 March 2023
| Audited | Audited | Change | |
| 2023 | 2022 | ||
| £’000 | £’000 | ||
| Revenue | 5,586 | 3,640 | +53% |
| Gross profit | 4,136 | 2,616 | +58% |
| Adjusted profit before taxation | 1,230 | 573 | +115% |
| Statutory profit / (loss) before tax | 519 | (1,889) | |
| Earnings per shareNet cash | 2.4p1,138 | (7.1)p3,051 |
Financial highlights
| • | Revenue increased to £5.6m (2022: £3.6m) up 53% |
| • | Consultancy services revenue £2.3m and data (ARR) revenue £3.3m, up 114% |
| • • | Significant revenue (£2.5m) carried over into new financial year, providing good forward visibility Significantly improved operating profit at £1.2m (2022: £573k) up 115% Profit before tax of £520k against a loss for the prior year of £1.9m |
| • | Earnings per share of 2.4p compared to a loss of (7.1)p in 2022 |
Post period highlights
| • | Strategic partnership to exploit a multi-million US dollar opportunity with Jonas Fitness Inc, part of Jonas Software, a worldwide Constellation Software company |
| • • | Strategic partnership agreement for a multi-million-pound opportunity with the fitness equipment and digital health provider Technogym to work with their existing and mutual clients to enhance their data insight solutions Continued strong financial performance in first quarter of new financial year, with confidence in continued strong financial performance. The Company remains focused on continuing to grow its data and insight products revenue, due to revenue visibility and higher margin profile. |
Eloy Mazon, Chief Executive Officer of 4GLOBAL commented:
“We completed our first full year as an AIM quoted company and are in a strong financial position – profitable and with a sound balance sheet – the business has an excellent foundation on which to build in the current financial year and the future.
“Demand for our data and insight products continues to grow. The many significant challenges faced in our sector due to the uncertain global economic outlook, will, we believe, drive our customers to seek ever more business-critical insight and this is the very strong message we are getting from our customers.
“We are encouraged by the prospects for the rest of the financial year and beyond as we seek to increase our penetration in the European and North American markets and develop new revenue streams associated with our data.”
CHAIRMAN’S STATEMENT
I am very pleased to announce our results for the year ended 31 March 2023. We have built on the foundations of the previous year and have established deep long-term partnerships with key clients that have resulted in the robust performance being announced today. Clients are seeing the benefits of our data and the provision of insights that our data provides which allows them to make, and continue to make, insightful business decisions.
Results
The financial results for the year ended 31 March 2023 reflect the hard work by Eloy Mazon (CEO) and his team. Revenue for the year ended 31 March 2023 was £5.6m, up 53% on the previous year. As per our strategy, we continue to grow our data products and platforms and increasingly our other services rely on our unique data sets as part of the offering, we will identify our revenues as being generated from our unique data set. We have shown in our segmental analysis the split between Consultancy and Data. Moving forward, we will migrate our clients to new contracts that will reflect the fact that we supply services in a data rich environment. The result of which will be higher ARR and forward visibility.
Our alternative reporting results for the year ended 31 March 2023 was an adjusted earnings before interest tax depreciation and amortisation of £1.23m (2022: £0.573m) an increase of 115%.
Board and People
I would like to thank my fellow Board members for their continued support and contribution to the Group. I would also like to thank Roger Taylor who stepped down from the Board in October 2022 after assisting in guiding us through the IPO process and wish him well for the future.
I must thank our colleagues within the business for their continued hard work and professionalism and their vital support in delivering these results. We are a dynamic business and our colleagues have produced exceptional work for and on behalf of clients.
Annual General Meeting
The Annual General Meeting will be held on 27 September 2023 at the Company’s offices, 5th Floor, Building 7 Chiswick Park, 566 Chiswick High Road, Chiswick, London, W4 5YG.
Outlook
We have established partnerships with our client base that are deep rooted and will continue to supply data products and platforms that our clients use in their everyday business decision making and insights. The Board is confident about the Group’s current prospects.
Ian James
Chairman
26 July 2023
CHIEF EXECUTIVE’S STATEMENT
In our first full year as a quoted company, we continue to build a reputation with all our stakeholders for delivering great products and platforms from our unique data set and for delivering strong financial results for the business.
Our revenue for the financial year ended 31 March 2023 showed a year-on-year growth of 53% up from £3.6m to £5.6m. We produced a statutory profit before tax of £0.5m (2022: Loss (£1.9m)) and an adjusted EBTIDA of £1.23m against £0.573 m for the previous year, a 115% increase.
This achievement was made possible thanks to the enormous efforts of everyone at 4GLOBAL over the years during which we have established an incredible reputation in our sector worldwide and developed a unique data set and insight products that are recognised as having transformed our customers businesses.
A key priority for us over the years has been to ensure that 4GLOBAL was built on a robust foundation with solid business principles around revenue, profitability and sustainable growth. This has allowed us to successfully navigate the turbulent macro-economic climate of the past year, continuing to deliver strong growth and a solid financial position.
Our growth strategy is underpinned by four pillars; international expansion, “land & expand” clients, acquisition strategy and data commercialisation. The reporting year to 31 March 2023 was the second year in our five-year strategic cycle and we continually review and measure the performance we have made against each of our strategic pillars.
| • | International expansion – we have seen strong demand from international markets especially the middle east where our partnership model is developing business opportunities. Our initial expansion into the North American and European markets is going well and we have signed commercial partnerships with key players in these markets such as Jonas, Technogym and IHRSA from which we will develop revenue generating opportunities in the near future. |
| • | “Land and expand” clients – we continue to land new clients, 17.6% of revenue was generated from new client relationships in the financial year. We were also able to expand relationships with existing clients. The current need for data and insight to navigate complex strategic, operational and investment challenges has generated strong demand for our data and insight products and services and this has been reflected in the recurring revenue growth compared to last year. |
| • | Acquisition strategy – we are constantly evaluating opportunities for acquisition. Our focus is to ensure that any company we acquire is aligned to our core business values and financial criteria of profitability, cash generation and annual recurring revenues so that they are accretive to the overall value of 4GLOBAL. Reviewing the market for potential acquisitions continues to be an opportunity for our growth strategy. |
| • | Data commercialisation – we have built one of the biggest and unique databases of how individuals consume sport. We believe that our strength is a data company and not a software company, therefore we believe in providing our customers with the option of using our data – under the same data user agreements signed with the data controllers – irrespective of the software platform they might want to use to draw the unique insights that only our data provides. This allows us to open up new customer types who have other software products embedded in their organisation but that without our data would not deliver the sort of insights we can provide. |
Overall, excellent progress has been made in executing our strategy and we are pleased with the results it is generating.
During the financial year we released updated editions of CitiHub 2.0; Social Value Calculator (“SVC”) 3.0; SVC Canada 1.0; Demand Modelling Tool 1.0 and European DataHub 1.0.
CitiHub integrates physical activity and participation programmes with additional data to provide insight and activity trends and assists in the planning of interventions to address physical inactivity and related health issues.
SVC was designed to give leisure operators a way of measuring and providing evidence for the Social Value created from investment in sport and physical activity.
Our Demand Modelling Tool provides a clear set of demand projections in terms of unique users and weekly participation for a range of facility types, as well as benchmarking this against sector averages, understanding membership numbers and how much social value that could be generated.
The tool allows users to model a range of investment scenarios and identify the optimal facility mix should investment be made, whether this is through the development of new sites or redevelopment at existing facilities.
This gives the ability to measure the potential impact and outputs can be used to drive the commercial model for investment into a site.
We are taking our DataHub into Europe where we have established a partnership with the trade association, EuropeActive, with the intention of developing a central database for physical activity participation data across Europe.
Our data asset grew significantly in this period, currently we have 3.5 billion data points and processing significant amounts of data on a daily basis; in England alone we are processing in excess of 1million data points per day. This growth in our data assets solidifies our position in the market, increases entry barriers and allows us to provide even more valuable and unique insights.
By integrating data analytics capabilities, technology implementation, and strategic consulting we offer our clients end-to-end solutions. With our data asset as the foundation, our unique data-driven decision-making approach enables us to empower clients with intelligence and actionable insights aligned to their strategic objectives and business priorities, giving us a distinctive edge in the market.
Summary and Outlook
We completed our first full year as an AIM quoted company and are in a strong financial position – profitable and with a sound balance sheet – the business has an excellent foundation on which to build in the current financial year and the future.
Demand for our data and insight products continues to grow. The many significant challenges faced in our sector due to the uncertain global economic outlook, will, we believe, drive our customers to seek ever more business-critical insight and this is the very strong message we are getting from our customers.
We are encouraged by the prospects for the rest of the financial year and beyond as we seek to increase our penetration in the European and North American markets and develop new revenue streams associated with our data.
As predicted, the line between service and technology revenue is becoming harder to differentiate as the majority of our relationships with customers are annual recurring or repeatable (“ARR”) type of relationships. It is for this reason that in the financial year ending 31 March 2024 we plan to start the migration of all existing customers and new customers to this type of contracting, accelerating this way the transition that began some years ago from a service revenue business to a data and technology revenue business.
We believe this change in approach to our contractual relationship with our customers will better represent the nature of the business and its value, at the same time that it will drive a number of operational efficiencies.
I would like to thank all our staff for their efforts in 2022/23 to realise the true potential of 4GLOBAL and growth capabilities.
Eloy Mazon
Chief Executive Officer
26 July 2023
