This maker of smartwatches for kids is up 46pc since mid-Jan

The boss of listed wearables tech play MGM Wireless (ASX:MWR) says kids’ smartwatches are taking off — and he’s got the revenues to back it up.

MGM Wireless makes Spacetalk — a smartwatch for children that allows for two-way communication with parents and has a built-in phone and GPS services — and earlier this week announced its revenue for the March quarter was up 392 per cent on the prior year.

That’s on the back of Australian and New Zealand sales, and in even better news for the company, in a couple of weeks’ time it will be launching in the UK.

“These kids smartwatches are essentially a whole new product category and they’re absolutely going off,” chief Mark Fortunatow told Stockhead recently. “And we are very much the leader in the industry.”

In mid-January the company’s shares were languishing at $2.82 but on the back of the UK news and half-yearly and March quarterly financial reports they have marched to $4.12, a rise of 46 per cent.

MGM Wireless (ASX:MWR) shares this year.

However that is short of the $5.02 highs the company hit in November last year upon getting a distribution deal with Kiwi telco provider Spark.

The company has banked $5.5 million in revenue for the year-to-date, a 193 per cent increase on this time last year, while unit sales have increased to over 16,000, a phenomenal 1,603 per cent jump.

Fortunatow says the growth had been driven by demand, as parents and schools look for ways to keep kids safe in a world where social media is ubiquitous.

“Families have a basic need to stay in touch with each other and parents want to be connected to their children,” he says. “But providing a young child with a smartphone is a danger because you are open to social media, YouTube, the internet, so families are telling us there’s a real need to keep their younger ones safe from the dark side of smartphones, which we see results in a lot of bullying.”

The company picked up on the market gap as far back as 2006, but it has taken until recent years for the technology to catch up.

“We built various different technologies, none of which worked very well,” Fortunatow says. “Now, with an all-in-one device, we’re able to confidently go to the market, we’ve got good comms in schools and with parents and we’re performing very well.”