Actual Experience plc (LON:ACT), the analytics-as-a-service company, today announced a trading update for its financial year ended 30 September 2021. The Company intends announcing its results for the year in January 2022.
Our first full year operating our professional services ‘land and expand’ model has seen good progress, faster customer engagement and quicker software deployment. The hybrid workplace revolution has seen continued momentum, prompting a wider recognition by the market of the power of our unique technology. Together with the launch of our direct sales function, and enhanced engagement with our Channel Partners, this has resulted in new business wins as announced in recent months, for our Business Impact Assessment (BIA), and our Continuous Improvement (CI) services.
In respect of the financial year just ended, the Company generated revenues of £1.7m (2020: £1.9m); £0.1m of the reduction from the previous year was attributable to the fall in value of sterling against the US dollar. As planned, the Company incurred a pre-tax loss as a result of the ongoing investment in technology, sales and marketing functions. Looking forward, we expect to begin to benefit from the ramp up of revenues being generated by new business wins, set against the probability that a long standing contract (originally announced in 2018 via a Channel Partner), that relies on our legacy offering, will not renew in the coming months due to a change in customer strategy. This contract generated revenues of £1.2m in the year just ended.
Following the placing conducted in January 2021, Actual Experience retains a solid financial position with year end net cash standing at £8.2m (30 September 2020: £2.7m), with slightly reduced cash outflows from operating activities of £3.7m for the year (2020: £3.9m).
Overall, whilst we have made good progress during the year, our sales cycle remains lengthy and efforts to reduce this are being hampered by the pandemic and the resultant elongation of procurement processes.
Encouragingly, however, we are seeing good momentum in our targeting of a growing range of direct and Channel Partner sales opportunities, including many large global blue-chip customers. From our sales pipeline development during the financial year, 16 large blue chip opportunities emerged. Of these one has already moved into CI, three have completed their BIA and are now considering moving to CI, whilst the remaining engagements continue to move forward with only one having dropped out of the pipeline.
The current total addressable market of employees in our target enterprises has grown from four million to more than 12 million since January 2021 and we expect to see more opportunities emerge from this funnel in the coming financial year.
Dave Page, CEO of Actual Experience, commented:
“In 2021 we demonstrated our ‘land and expand’ business model and ability to win large global blue-chip customers with our new customer offering. Going into 2022, our focus will be continuing to convert the 15 large scale opportunities to ongoing CI wins. Through the direct and partner sales channels we will continue to develop similar new opportunities from our funnel, delivering more new business wins to generate long term, profitable contracted revenues. We are excited by the prospects in our pipeline and the immediate opportunities in front of us, notwithstanding the challenge of lengthy sales cycles, which we are working with our customers to reduce.”
