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ASX Tech Stocks: Appen (ASX:APX) drops 19% off H2 revenue and Quadrant acquisition plans
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AI-assisted data platform provider Appen (ASX:APX) dropped 19.10% today after announcing revenue contracted by 2% in H2 FY21 to $196,562,000.
The company said the first half growth rate was dampened as global customers allocated resources to new and non-advertising projects in the first half.
However new markets revenue did increase 31.5% to $47,763,000 across AR/VR and geolocation-based services – and Appen expects continued revenue growth from this area.
The company also announced plans to acquire Quadrant – whose Geolancer platform provides authentic, accurate, and up-to-date POI data, manually verified on the ground by crowd workers.
Appen said the unified business would be strongly positioned to deliver high-quality data to organisations that rely on geolocation for their business – particularly since the global location intelligence market was valued at US$11.9 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a 14% CAGR, reaching ~US$29.8 billion in 2027.
“The acquisition of Quadrant enables Appen to increase our addressable market and to expand our product and service offering to our customers to include more mobile location and POI data capabilities,” ceo Mark Brayan said.
“We already have the broadest AI training data offering in the industry, and we see an opportunity to grow in the mobile location and POI data space.
“With Quadrant’s Geolancer and our global crowd, we will be strongly positioned to serve our customers’ scale, speed and quality requirements.”
The company will pay an upfront cash payment of US$25 million and a potential additional payment of up to US$20 million in Appen shares to be issued upon achieving revenue milestones in 2022 and 2023.
Elsewhere, video tech company Linius Technologies (ASX:LNU) jumped 9.09% today after releasing a market update to investors detailing its ‘trial-in-a-box’ program designed to accelerate trial adoption and conversion to sale of its Whizzard video product for the higher education sector.
The company recently secured a three-year agreement with the University of Newcastle and said the Australian higher education sector’s addressable market is around 1 million students and more than 49,000 academic teaching staff across 41 universities.
Not to mention these universities have a combined $2.3 billion annual IT spend (in 2019) which is growing at around 8.9% per annum.
Linius has its sights set on agreements with 20 priority universities which would represent annual recurring revenues of around $15 million per year plus material revenue from data packs.
The company said the first 10 university agreements would be the ‘tipping point’ for mass adoption and expected the Newcastle win to be leverageable across the market.
