Arria NLG PLC (LON:NLG) Chief Financial Officer Wayne Thornhill caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their year-end results ending 30th September 2015
Q1: You’ve released your results for the year ending 30th September today, can you talk us through the period highlights?
A1: Yes, sure. So I guess the headlines are revenues are up by 88% which is encouraging, cash based operating costs are down by nearly 28%, we’ve got more cash on hand than what we had this time last year and we’ve got continuing support from our major shareholders which has gone through the year end into the post year end period with the additional at Lanstead so that’s all really good. If you dig a little bit deeper, what you see across 2015 is a real diversification in our client base both in number of client engagements and in the range of industries that we’ve engaged in, we’ve moved from being oil and gas and meteorology centric last year and in the current year we’ve added clients in financial services; across insurance and banking, in aviation and oil and gas services and travel and FMCG and that’s not to mention partnership with IBM. So our client engagement and clients contributing to revenue have both seen significant increases compared to the prior year and the speed that we’re moving through that process and the sales process is continuing to improve. Now obviously, the loss of Shell was a setback however the increase in breadth and depth of new clients is making us much stronger and less vulnerable and that is beginning to be reflected in the numbers when you compare to prior years. Most importantly, you see the increase in new client revenue significantly higher than this time last year. They’re really the main highlights for me.
Q2: Now you touched on this a little, we can see that you’re now operating in different industries, can you give us some examples of the applications that you’re seeing from your technology?
A2: What’s really interesting and encouraging is that the platform can be applied in many different commercial applications and done so to assist in solving a variety of problems. Again, we’ve expanded from adding rotating equipment engineering and meteorological expertise in the platform in the last year and in 2015 we’ve been adding engineering in aviation expertise, oil and gas services and if you look at what we’re actually doing, we moved from writing weather reports to providing narrative voice responses to travel queries, we’re writing road ice reports in multiple languages and we’re producing management reporting for clients across a range of industries.
Q3: You talk in your statement about extending the technology in 2 directions in 2016, can you tell us more about that?
A3: In addition to where we’re selling, it’s what we’re selling and how we’re selling. So we’re moving from a platform sale predominantly in big oil and we’re supplementing that to sales of our software development kit and launch of our own SaaS products, the first you’ll see in 2016. Now our SDK (software development kit) will allow developers anywhere to create applications which we’ll then seek to monetise through licence sales micro-services and we believe that this, the SDK, will allow more organisations with a do-it-yourself view and existing internal resource to build their own applications. On the other hand, our SaaS product, the first one that will launch in the New Year, will allow financial managers, in pretty much any business, to take the bulk of the leg work out of their management reporting by automating that report writing process and we’ll be delivering that at a much lower price point to encourage wider adoption. Really in the longer term, the goal is to monetise the creation of content from data across multiple sectors, you’ll be seeing our virtual accountants and engineers providing clients expert content, as and when they need it, in a fraction of the time it currently takes and at a much lower price point.
