UK vendor trends

This blog has reported several times on the financial performance of the main UK vendors of construction collaboration technologies (aka ‘extranets’).

In light of recent results, I thought I would provide a quick graphical update/overview of the performance of the main UK vendors (those for whom I have some financial information) over the past four years.

The UK construction collaboration technology market is now roughly twice the size it was four years ago. The combined revenues of six firms exceed £15m; guessing at the collaboration revenues earned by some of the other vendors, I estimate the market is now worth somewhere in the region of £20m-£25m.

It is clear that BIW Technologies [my employer], 4Projects and Business Collaborator have experienced sustained growth in revenues since 2003 – all growing at similar rates. Turnover at BuildOnline UK (now CTSpace) parallelled these three initially, but then began to falter.

Asite

However, perhaps the most significant finding concerns the decline of Asite, whose turnover has fallen year after year from its peak of £1.697m in 2003 to £1.354m last year (see recent post; Asite’s turnover also includes revenues from other products so collaboration revenues will be even lower when compared to collaboration-only vendors). From being the third biggest vendor (in terms of turnover), Asite has dropped to sixth, being overtaken in 2006 by Styles & Wood’s StoreData. (BTW: I notice Asite is now offering advertising on its website. Share price today 1.875 pence.)

The rest?

What about the other UK collaboration technology vendors? As previously noted (see November 2006 post: BIW’s growth continues – but what about the others?), there is little publicly available financial information on Aconex (UK) Ltd, Cadweb, Causeway, ePIN or Sarcophagus. As “small companies” meeting two of the following criteria – annual turnover of £5.6million or less, balance sheet total of £2.8 million or less, average of 50 of fewer employees – they need only submit an abbreviated balance sheet to Companies House (reading the latest return by Aconex UK Ltd, for example, I needed a financially-qualified colleague to discern that they lost circa £330k in the year to 30 June 2006, and long-term liabilities increased by circa 35% – no turnover, no P&L, nothing to help us make a meaningful comparison).