Today is the last day of trading on London’s Alernative Investment Market for construction collaboration SaaS technology vendor Asite (see Asite to delist from AIM to trim costs), which – following a name-change from Premisys – has been on AIM since January 2002.
It has not been a particularly helpful ‘barometer’ of the fortunes of similar vendors. Asite struggled to match the growth reported by non-listed UK competitors such as 4Projects and BIW [my employer] – see post. Its share price last topped 4p in early 2005, and even recent improvements in its performance (see Asite continues ascent) have not stopped the shares sliding. Volumes traded have rarely been high and, amid more general market turmoil, Asite’s price declined dipping gradually towards and then finally, this year, below the 1p mark (closing at 0.75p on Friday).
As previously noted (Asite Asides), the less public scrutiny of its performance will also mean that we will probably have to wait a while before we can glean what impact the current recession in the AEC sector has had on the construction collaboration technology vendors. Like most businesses reliant upon providing services to the construction and property sectors, I expect we will (eventually) see growth, turnover and profitability all down, as project cancellations and postponements hit project-dependent revenues.
2 comments
It looks like Constructware in the US will be following Asite as a casualty of the economy and poor acquisition execution. Here is an article about Autodesk suspending Constructware development. http://www.specialtypub.com/emailblasts/CT_09_NEWSFLASH_05_Autodesk.htm
While I am sure Asite will – like many other software vendors focused on the AEC sector – have suffered during the current recession due to project cancellations and postponements and customer pressure to cut costs, I think it is a little premature to describe the company as a casualty of the economy.