Trading update

Jan 27, 2014

RNS Number : 5172Y
Cloudbuy PLC
27 January 2014

cloudBuy plc ("cloudBuy" or the "Company")
Trading update

cloudBuy (AIM: cbuy.L), the cloud eCommerce marketplace, today provides an update on trading for the year ended 31 December 2013.

The Company enjoyed strong trading in the year, delivering good growth in eCommerce marketplace and spend analysis revenue of over 50% on the preceding year.  While the Company Formations division continued to see a small decline, overall revenues enjoyed strong growth resulting in a profitable cash generative UK operation in line with market expectations.  Following our stated strategy the profits from the UK business were invested in additional resources, in particular in sales and marketing activities and technical support of an accelerated Visa roll-out, alongside a small part of the proceeds of the Company's placing and open offer of £5.3m. This has resulted in a slightly higher loss to that in the preceding year.  As a consequence of this activity we start the year with the best pipeline that the Company has ever had, with active prospects in each of Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China, India, Canada and the USA, as well as our UK opportunities.

Following the placing and open offer referred to above, the Company has significantly strengthened its executive management and delivery team with the recent arrival among others of Jonathan Holden from Visa as CEO for the Europe Middle East and Africa region, along with the global solution team of Russell Darling, Nilesh Gopali, Sharlene Jobson and Chris Hope.  The Asia Pacific team has also been strengthened with Patrick Broughton as its President, Dale Stephens as CEO for the region and Jeff Corcoran joining as a Sales Executive.

This investment in people has helped the Company to make very good progress in Asia Pacific along with the transition to its new business model as previously announced.  The rebranding of the business' operations as cloudBuy was completed and successfully launched and the Company is now in a strong position to convert the pipeline.

In the UK, we continue to see growth across all areas of our operation with contract wins increasing. The Company invested considerable resources in product development in 2013, particularly in the area of content management.  The Company has developed a sophisticated content management system (CMS) which can be independently deployed for any customer or used in an integrated manner to customise cloudBuy eCommerce marketplaces and eCommerce websites.

This enterprise technology allows cloudBuy to quickly customise eCommerce marketplaces to meet diverse customer needs, ranging from eProcurement and care through to citizen disbursements and insurance payments.  These new marketplaces have a highly intuitive consumer interface, which integrates seamlessly with the controlled back office workflow.  Customer feedback is very positive and the new suite of solutions moves cloudBuy substantially ahead of its competitors.

The Company secured a number of significant contract wins in Social Care and has now established itself as a market leader in this rapidly growing segment, where over 80% of the available market has yet to choose a solution.  In tandem, the NHS is implementing personal health budgets from April 2014, where the 211 Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) have to offer all qualifying  personal budget holders a solution which allows them to choose and purchase their care.  We have good engagement in this area and are the only eMarketplace provider that is accredited by the NHS to hold patient data, giving us a distinct competitive advantage.

In the area of spend analysis,  the volume of spend analysed by our systems is now over $500 billion, and, as was demonstrated with the signing of the Tungsten contract announced on 4 September 2013, there are substantial revenues available in this area.  It is important to emphasise that these revenues are a small fraction of the recurring revenues that the Company can generate from realising the saving with our eCommerce marketplace available under the new business model.

Ronald Duncan, Executive Chairman, commented, "We are delighted with the progress made during the past year, both financially and operationally. The partnership with Visa underlines the superiority of our proven eCommerce marketplace and spend analysis software. In addition, we are confident that the combination of extended market reach which Visa provides, and our switch to a business model where we take a percentage of the volume flowing through the system, should result in increased prospects for the Company in the year ahead as we seek to convert our best ever pipeline."

Notice of Results

The Company expects to announce final results for the year ended 31 December 2013 on 12 March 2014.


For further information please contact:

cloudBuy plc                                                   
Ronald Duncan, Chairman
Tel: 0118 963 7000

Westhouse Securities Limited
Tom Griffiths/Richard Johnson
Tel: 020 7601 6100

Newgate Threadneedle
Caroline Evans-Jones/Alex White/Robyn McConnachie
Tel 020 7653 9850


About cloudBuy PLC
cloudBuy is Europe's leading transactional Cloud Platform with over 1 million users. The platform supports B2B eCommerce and eProcurement across a range of public and private sector organisations providing a secure, controlled transactional environment for B2B trading.  The technology is unique in the B2B market, in that it delivers the B2C internet shopping experience in a business environment.  The platform has been rebranded to cloudBuy.com for global expansion with Visa and partner banks.  The platform is PCI DSS accredited, providing secure, integrated financial transactional capability, delivering savings to both the buyer and the supplier through greater accounts payables accuracy, reduction of manual processes and elimination of paper.

cloudBuy provides an immediate business case using SpendInsight.  SpendInsight was developed to recognize, match and classify products and services, providing buyers with greater visibility to spend data, and supports the identification of cashable savings, through unique product level matching artificial intelligence.  The output from this is then passed to the Visa member bank, for analysis by Visa to identify which suppliers accept card payments currently and compute the potential card rebate to fund the B2B ecommerce platform.

For more information, visit www.cloudbuy.com

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