Storedata revenues down again

Interim results from Styles and Wood include half-year performance figures for its retail-oriented construction collaboration solution provider StoreData. Reporting for the six months to 30 June 2009, these show that the business’s revenues have shrunk again. The business generated revenues of £0.589m, down 11% from £0.663m for the same period in 2008; the £0.103m profit was almost unchanged from the £0.107m achieved last year (see StoreData results).

This result continues a slide (see May 2009 post) that has been evident in StoreData’s revenues since its 2006 result, when the full-year total peaked at £1.594m, generating an operating profit of £0.425m (see 2006: OK for StoreData), though the overall recession may also have had an impact with StoreData’s core market of retailers and bankers investing at lower volumes in their property portfolios.

Regarding StoreData, the operational review says:

“StoreData extended its five year relationship with Tesco helping the market leading food retailer develop its property information system. The solution now helps the Tesco property team capture, store and manage property related information accelerating the property development process. The business was also engaged by Nationwide Building Society and the Co-Operative to develop property solutions to help manage their portfolio and their development programmes.”

Indications of a SaaS downturn

StoreData is one of the smaller UK-based vendors of online construction collaboration technology services, and now one of the only companies which is still publishing financial performance figures. I expect most, if not all, of its UK competitors will have seen similar pressure on revenues over the past year; certainly, there has been industry gossip about some SaaS vendors making staff redundancies to limit losses (see June 2009 post).

I recently met with one of Aconex‘s directors, operations director Paul Perrett, and we talked about how the collaboration vendors have been responding to the recession. He admitted that Australia-based Aconex had taken a hit in the Middle East (releasing some staff in Dubai, though Abu Dhabi remained more resilient); its operations in other areas of its operations (north Africa, south-east Asia) were more buoyant, he said. (I understand Aconex’s UK operation involves about eight staff, and it has continued to grow at modest rates.)