Is CCP Technologies the Dark Horse of the ASX Internet of Things race?

Special report: The “Internet of Things” space is booming.

Global spending on the technology — which allows devices such as cars, light switches or heart monitors to swap information over the Internet — is expected to reach $US1.2 trillion within five years.

With multiple different players vying for the spotlight, and a big addressable market, there’s a lot of noise in the media and speculation from investors.

Should we instead be looking at the quiet ones?

CCP Technologies (ASX:CT1) might just be the ‘dark horse’ in the ASX “IoT” race.

When others have been loud, CCP has been quietly building a deep network of customers across Australia, US and South East Asia in multiple verticals.

The company has recently worked with Vodafone to deploy its IoT technology at Sydney airport, and has alluded to a global agreement with the company, which Stockhead understands will be announced this week.

Solid customer wins across food retailers, healthcare, hospitality sectors, including well-known brands such as Caltex, Metcash and restaurant chain Criniti’s, were achieved with limited fanfare from the company.

What’s their strategy?

Focus on Critical Control Points

Many IoT players have focused on providing “cost savings” in areas such as energy consumption, which has fierce competition between the likes of BidEnergy (ASX:BID), BuildingIQ (ASX:BIQ) and EnergyOne (ASX:EOL).

But CCP has chosen to remain flexible.

Rather than focus on a specific market segment, CCP looks to build solutions that monitor ‘critical control points’.

These are specific points in a supply chain where an exact environment must be maintained.

While their initial focus has captured market share in food retail and food service with temperature and humidity monitoring, they are pursuing other opportunities such as pH monitoring in commercial applications, dissolved oxygen in aquaculture facilities, and now appliance-level energy mentoring.

Critical control points are far more ubiquitous than initially meets the eye.

For instance, supply chain temperature monitoring from ‘farm to fork’ results in hundreds of millions of critical control points in Australia and the US. When it comes to perishable food, failure at a critical control point leads to food waste and food safety risk.

Additionally, the causes for failure can also be identified by CCP. For example, whether a refrigerator door is open for too long or if the fridge fails altogether is crucial information for future prevention and contract enforcement.

This same automatic monitoring function is scalable across a variety of verticals — CCP customer ACT Health, a vaccine storage facility, uses this same function to ensure regulatory compliance and vaccine quality assurance.

According to CCP, the combined Australian and US food industry presents it with a total addressable market of 470 million monitoring points. Given the raft of paying customers CCP has on boarded this year, the sales pitch of cost-savings, assurance and compliance appears to be hitting the mark.

Hardware and software

Another point of differentiation is CCP’s refusal to focus on the hardware or software side of IoT exclusively.

Many IoT providers in this space have chosen to view themselves as software companies first, with hardware design and manufacture procured elsewhere.

This often means running generic operating software on generic IoT hardware designs. CCP bucks this trend, maintaining in-house development teams for hardware, firmware and software elements of its platform.

This strategy presents additional IP licensing and contract development opportunities to CCP.

Additionally, the approach protects it to a much greater degree to outside malicious actors such as hacking attempts, which are a common occurrence with IoT devices and often result in hesitation to adopt from organisations that produce or supply sensitive materials.

On the software side, web and mobile applications combine with enterprise-grade analytics to provide a simple interface and alert notification system.

Scale is the word

CCP’s strategy is to scale.

Its IP can be applied across multiple different verticals and the company is building a distribution channel.

Patents are set to be granted in Australia for its monitoring system, which underpins a strong tech offering that differentiates itself from competitors.

Analysts such as TMT’s Marc Kennis have expressed that the company’s share price often does not reflect its market opportunity in assessments of CCP.

With such a sizeable addressable market and agreements with potential global channel partners such as Vodafone, this may not be such a quiet member of the IoT race for long.

This special report is brought to you by CCP Technologies.

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