After three years of gradually dwindling turnover, UK-based construction collaboration technology vendor Asite looks like it has started to reverse the decline, mainly due to healthy revenues earned in the Middle East. Today’s Stock Exchange announcement of its interim results for the six months ended 30 June 2007 show gross revenues up 19% to £0.854m (from £0.719m for the same period in 2006), while its pre-tax loss was down 13% to £0.257m (£0.296m in 2006). A similar performance through to the end of 2007 would see Asite return to the levels of annual turnover it last achieved four years ago (2003: £1.697m).
For the first time, Asite has analysed its performance by geographic segment, divided into UK, UAE and Europe. The UK accounts for the lion’s share (83%) of the company’s revenues, with most of the rest arising in the fast-growing AEC market in the Middle East (15%) where it generated revenues of £124k (up from just £8k last year). Several of the other principal ‘extranet’ vendors are also targeting the Middle East – Aconex, for example, has been publishing a steady flow of news releases about wins in the region, and I know from a recent NCCTP meeting that both Cadweb and Sarcophagus (among others) have also been exploring opportunities there.
However, looking at Asite’s UK segment, revenues were up just 3% in the first half of 2006.
The financial review says “the sales pipeline remains healthy” and, after mentioning its Al Raha project win in Abu Dhabi, adds “The Group has £5.511m of contracted revenue stretching out to 2018”. This is down on the order book level (£5.811m) previously reported for the start of 2007.
Uptake of services
Use of Asite’s services continued to grow:
“In the first half of 2007, of users and organisations accessing the site rose from 24,716 and 3,457 to 29,202 and 3,818 respectively. The number of documents managed over the site has increased from 1,809,990 to 2,233,977 during the same period.”
That means 4486 new users, 361 user companies and 423,987 documents were added in the first six months.
As previously noted, Asite is still being outstripped in these respects by rival UK vendors such as BIW [my employer] and 4Projects. BIW, for instance, reports its numbers of users, etc, weekly on its website, and added 11,952 users and 1135 companies in the same period. Asite’s total user base is a third the size of BIW’s.
Related posts: UK vendor trends; Asite 2006 financials
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[…] 2007 (see London Stock Exchange notice). Building on the promising first half of the year (see Asite stops the rot), the company has finally reversed the declining revenues experienced for the previous three years, […]