Boku Inc (LON:BOKU), the world’s leading independent carrier commerce company, has today provided an update on trading in the first two months of the current financial year.
In January and February 2020 Total Payment Volumes grew to $966 million, an increase of 30% compared to the same period last year, a slightly larger increase than anticipated. Monthly Active Users are also continuing to increase month by month, with 18.2 million MAUs in February 2020, an increase of 36% on February 2019.
In addition, February 2020 daily volumes showed an increase over January 2020 despite the increasing prevalence of Covid-19 (‘Coronavirus’) worldwide. Average TPV per day increased by 2.5% in February 2020 compared to January 2020 and Daily Average Users (“DAU”) were 4% higher in February 2020 than January 2020.
Jon Prideaux, CEO of Boku Inc, commented: “Naturally we are concerned about the spread of Coronavirus and feel for those people affected. The recent growth we have seen in those countries that are most affected has been higher than in those where the virus has had a more limited impact so far*. This could be correlation rather than causation, but, in general, the more time people spend indoors, the more our platform is utilised. If large numbers of people are forced to self isolate we would predict that, as already seen in China#, this would lead to an increase in the usage of online games and streaming services.
“We look forward to providing further updates at the time of the release of our audited 2019 results at the end of March 2020 and remain confident of meeting market expectations for the current year.”
*increased DAU counts were seen in the second half of February 2020 versus the second half of January 2020 in South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Kuwait, Oman, Philippines and the U.A.E., with East Asian countries in aggregate accounting for nearly two thirds of the increase.
# AppAnnie reports a 40% increase in average weekly downloads of Apps in China in the first two weeks of February 2020 compared to average downloads in 2019.
