Boku Inc (LON:BOKU) Chief Executive Officer Jon Prideaux caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their latest trading update, integration of Danal and being well positioned for the rest of the year.
Q1: First off, congratulations on your trading update today, can you talk us through the highlights?
A1: I think it’s one of those things, steady as she goes, we are on track to achieve the full year guidance that we set out.
So, in the first half, we were able to post revenue that was at least 33% up to the same period last year which would mean that at our trading update stage, the estimated revenue will be somewhere between $22.5 million to $23 million of which identity will represent between 14-16% of the total revenue.
So, that’s obviously a goodly portion of the way to achieving the full year expectation of at $52 million worth of revenue, clearly the nature of our business is somewhat backend weighted, you have more game releases in the second half of the year.
We would expect to obviously have a better second half as we’re growing, particularly on the identity side where we are seeing quite a rapid acceleration having completed the acquisition from Danal.
Underpinning those sort of financial guidance’s are some pretty decent numbers as far as non-financial KPIS’s are concerned, both monthly active users and total payment volume were up by around 50%, just under in fact. The total payment volume on the payment side of the business being around $2.3 billion and the number of monthly active users topping 15 million, at 15.3.
For the identity business, we also some strong growth in non-financial indicators, those KPI’s also are moving in the right direction, about 100% up in terms of billable transactions and a significant increase to about 74 million numbers that we’re being monitored in comparison to around 12 million in December last year.
So, good levels of growth and activity, not all of that reach straight across into revenue growth because prices are somewhat different but we are comfortable with the progress that we’ve shown through the rest of this year.
We’re about 43% of the way to the full year, and with the accelerated business, we restate, with confidence, our ability to meet the challenging targets we set out for this year.
Q2: You acquired Danal at the beginning of the year, which is now fully integrated as Boku Identity, are you pleased with the results that you’re seeing so far?
A2: Yes, I think it’s a case of so far so good, we’re a long way from achieving the full potential as far as Identity is concerned.
So, the business we’re reporting on, this year I suppose you would argue as being this is what we’ve inherited, in the second half you’ll start to see somewhat of what we’ve made, what we’ve done for ourselves.
It takes a while to be able to roll things out and a lot of the revenue, indeed the vast majority of the revenue that ahs been generated by Identity right now is being achieved in the home market of the US. Our challenge is to have products and services that can really exploit Boku’s platform, its international and so forth.
We haven’t seen much of that happening in the first year, it’s been integration, set up and so forth, and what we’re looking to try to do is to make more progress, accelerating progress on that in the second half of the year which obviously helps us meet this year’s expectations and sets us up a for a good 2020.
Q3: Do you think that Boku Inc is well positioned for the rest of 2019?
A3: Yes, in a business that’s growing very fast, it’s always going to be the case that you’ll achieve less than 50% of your full year number in the half. We’re definitely well positioned with Identity showing good year-on-year growth and we clearly need to make that accelerate.
Certainly, on the payment side of the business, the way that the games release schedule has fallen this year very much means that as new games releases come out, as the connections that we put live start achieving a full year effect, we feel that we’re going to be set up for a strong second half to help us fulfil our 2019 expectation.
