Actual Experience Plc (LON:ACT), the analytics-as-a-service company, has announced an update on trading for the financial year ended 30 September 2022, as well as recent progress regarding important commercial initiatives.
Trading Update
As reported in both the Company’s Interim Results and September Placing announcement, Actual has been putting in place the people and technology components required to claim a leading position in the emerging market for Human Experience Management (HX). Our focus remains on enabling our customers to optimise their digital ecosystem to increase productivity and enhance employee wellbeing. As previously communicated, the financial year ended 30 September 2022 was therefore a period of transition as the Company laid the groundwork for its new market focus and it is our belief that the Company is now in a strong position to capitalise on the significant market opportunity that exists.
Revenue for the year ended 30 September 2022 was generated entirely from legacy sales engagements and amounted to £1.2m (2021: £1.7m); as previously announced, this decrease is attributable to legacy contracts that were not renewed during the year.
We remain focused on expanding our sales prospect pipeline and, in particular, generating orders from our more advanced opportunities. Feedback from partners and enterprises for our newly launched Digital Workplace Management Platform continues to be very positive, and such is the importance of employee productivity and welfare we are able to engage with heads of transformation and C-Suite executives at an early stage in the sales cycle. Increasingly, commentators such as Gartner and Forrester suggest that 2023 will be the year when organisations prioritise investment in technologies that improve their hybrid digital infrastructure.
During the year, significant cost reductions, relative to the peak level of spending earlier in the year, amounting to approximately a third of peak monthly spending (savings of £0.2m per month) were achieved through reduced headcount and other operational initiatives. This will benefit the new financial year that commenced 1 October 2022 by lowering the Company’s cash burn and break even point.
Net cash at 30 September 2022 was £2.9m (30 September 2021: £8.2m). Following the fund raise completed in October 2022 which raised net proceeds of £2.8m, Actual Experience retains a solid financial position, with net cash of £5.0m at 31 October 2022. This reflects slightly higher than normal expenditure in October.
Actual intends to announce its full year results in late January 2023, at which time the Company will provide a further update on current trading.
Digital Workplace Management Platform
In August 2022, the Company completed the initial scale deployment of the DWMP with an existing customer and then proceeded to ongoing live service in October 2022. The platform has proven to work reliably at scale in this large deployment and is already providing a wealth of actionable information regarding opportunities to derive digital workplace efficiencies. This has resulted in strongly positive customer feedback.
Partner Programme Update
We are pleased with the on-going support and continuing commitment of our commercial channel partners Verizon and Vodafone, both of whom are actively promoting DWMP to their customer base. Most of the sales leads currently being pursued by Actual are being generated in this way.
Actual is actively seeking new partner relationships with leading technology and consulting companies. Several of these projects are well advanced and the Board expects to announce new partners in due course.
In particular, the Company is pleased with its recent progress with LACE Partners, a specialist HR consultancy with a ‘Big Four’ heritage. Together with LACE, Actual is actively pursuing several opportunities with LACE’s large global clients.
LACE Managing Director and Co-founder Cathy Acratopulo commented
“Talent attraction, hybrid working, and the employee value proposition (EVP) are deeply interwoven future of work themes and dominate HR’s 2023 agenda.
There is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform the EVP and workplace technology. CPO and CIO must come together to make this transformation a success, but this has to be a human-centric, data-driven process. CPO’s have an opportunity to embrace data and lead their business through systemic, quantifiable improvements in employee retention and productivity. Equally, CIO’s have an opportunity to embrace new data and deliver more directly than ever to top-level business objectives This is why we have decided to partner with Actual, whose insights into the human experience of the digital workplace uniquely bridge the gap between technology and employee experience and productivity, and create a new, actionable common language for CPO and CIO. We are delighted with the response we have seen from our clients to Actual’s offering.”
CEO Recruitment Process
The Company continues to work with an executive recruiter to evaluate external and internal candidates. This process is close to completion and a further announcement is expected to be made early next year. Until this time, Steve Bennetts remains as Interim CEO (in addition to his CFO duties), and Kirsten English continues to act as Executive Chair.
Kirsten English, Executive Chair of Actual Experience plc, commented:
“There has been continuing momentum and clear progress achieved in recent months driven by our new leadership team and a stronger commercial focus. In particular, it is encouraging to see the uniformly positive reaction from both Partners and enterprise prospects to our newly-launched DWMP.
The measures that we have put in place over the last year have resulted in the Company being well placed to respond to the strong emerging enterprise demand for HX solutions to improve digital productivity and employee wellbeing in the Hybrid Working environment. We look forward to updating shareholders as 2023 progresses.”
