Bango has just published its Preliminary Results for the year ended 31 March 2009 and reported strong growth in revenues with revenues up 61.0% between first and second half of FY09.

Several major US customers started their transition from using Premium SMS aggregators to Bango during the year, causing a five fold increase in US revenues.

Ray Anderson, Chief Executive Officer of Bango, commented:

”After a year in which we focused on improving our sales and marketing productivity, we have seen strong growth in revenues. We enter the new year close to break even on a monthly basis, with significantly lowered costs of sale and strong signs that mobile web usage is accelerating. Working with mobile operators, content providers, brands, and other commercial partners and investors, we look forward to increasing shareholder value in the coming years.”

As an investor you will no doubt be pleased to hear that the new Financial Times mobile website – m.ft.com was launched today.

As a Bango investor you will be doubly pleased to hear that Bango technology is at the heart of the new site, providing the real-time identification technology that enables FT to personalize your end user experience.

FT joins the many businesses around that are targetting mobile users through their phone browsers.

Many of you will also have seen that many of the US’s largest mobile content companies have recently started to use Bango Payment services to collect payment from Sprint or AT&T users.

Bango’s presentation to investors and analysts in London on 25th November 2008 was well attended.  Notes were taken during the Q&A session, and a summary is provided below.   Please read in conjunction with the presentation: http://bangoinvestor.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/bgo_interims_ppt_sep_2008.pdf 

Q: Can you explain the differences between premium text based services and the mobile web based payment systems provided by Bango?

A: Traditionally, a customer would send a text to a service provider and the reply message would cost them money, and contain or point to the required content or service. With the mobile internet, a customer browses or searches to find the content they want, then clicks an “agree to payment link” to buy the content.

The problem with a text approach – in addition to the hassle of composing and sending a text message compared with clicking a linki – is that they are open to abuse. Mobile operators subscribers have been harmed by the abuse of text based payment systems. Hefty fines have been levied on those who cause problems but the abuses have continued. With mobile web payments, there is auditable proof that a user has clicked to agree to a set of terms and conditions.

Q: Content providers reported problems with buying mobile search traffic and advertising on some UK mobile operators.  What is the problem and when will we see this traffic pick up again?

A: Two of the UK mobile operators changed their search suppliers for their on-portal search, and they had both technical and operational problems making this change. Bango is working to help these operators overcome their problems. All parties involved are keen to sort it these problems out and are motivated to do so.  Changes are expected during and shortly after the calendar year end which should resolve some of these problems.

Q: Is there a risk to Bango Analytics from established PC Analytics companies like Omniture offering something similar?

A: PC Analytics companies will need to respond as their customers start to expand their activities into the fast growing mobile web. Existing PC analytics products don’t work on mobile devices. For example, java-script only works on a few mobiles, cookies don’t work reliably and the IP address of a user is shared with millions of others coming from the same mobile network.  PC analytics suppliers do not have the relationships, data or technologies to address these challenges. There is an opportunity for Bango to partner with these companies, to provide them with data that can be integrated into ther systems.  Bango already works with several Omniture customers and recently announced a partnership with Adversitement – a leading Omniture integrator – to better integrate Bango Analytics with the Omniture system.

Q: Can you talk about Nokia’s efforts to build a web-based platform?

A: We have many interactions with Nokia, who are starting to take a great deal of interest in the web and internet. They are following the “open model” promoted for the last 8 years by Bango, and we expect they will help grow the market.  They also represent a potential customer for Bango Analytics and for Bango Payment products.

Q: How interesting is the U.S?

A: Very interesting.  When we floated Bango we stated that our main focus in the future would be the US market.  It is where the world’s internet leaders are based and it also has a vibrant and large domestic market. Our investment is starting to bear fruit. At the moment it is the most exciting market we have.

Q: Are you going to have a presence in the U.S. or expand your presence there?

A: We have a presence – we have a team in New York and they are integrated with our team in the UK. We will expand our presence as appropriate, but at the moment we are finding that our existing team – supported by our self service model at www.bango.com is meeting demand.

Q: The cost of selling Payment products to content-providers seems to be falling – what is the expectation for Analytics products going forward?

A: The Analytics sales model is actually a lower touch model than that for payments.  90% of analytics customers are pure web-self service compared.  The sales process is simpler as it does not involve the complexities of billing requirements and pricing policies. We have also had a great deal of success working with partners who take our product to market alongside their own products or services.

Q: Can you explain the movements in overall gross margin?

A: End user spend should continue to grow based on the success of our content provider customers growing their businesses. In addition the fee revenues will increase based on increasing numbers of customer sign-ups and the increasing use of Bango Analytics. The mix will be affected by the relative speed of growth between these different margin sources. That’s why we report on our progress with both sources of margin separately.

Q: Based on current cash burn, cash looks adequate for the future, but can you say more about the RBS loan facility?

A: The RBS facility enables us to accelerate cash-flow to content providers, where this is in the interests of Bango and helpful to the content provider. Selected content providers are offered a one month “acceleration” of the revenues we will be paying them in return for a small fee.  This should be an attractive source of funding for them, and enables them to increase their marketing spend going forward.

We have just published our Interim results for 6 months ended 30th September 2008. 

Bango continues to make progress towards profitability, with losses and cash burn reduced to £25k in September, and with this progress continuing into the second half. Costs are stable and end-user spend has resumed growth month-on-month, following a UK summer lull similar to the one experienced last year.  We are seeing strong growth in revenue from North American market as established mass-market content providers in the USA move from SMS to the web-billing services offered by Bango

The launch of Bango Analytics at the beginning of this financial year is starting to generate additional revenue streams from a new range of customers, with an encouraging number won in a relatively short period. We expect to be able to announce further significant customer wins in the second half of the year.

Visit our Key Financial Documents page for copies of our Interims Announcement and a slide presentation summarising the results.

Please have a look at the blog post by Bango CEO Ray Anderson at  http://mobilesoapbox.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/the-pendulum-swings-back-to-paid-for-content/

Last night saw the Mobile Entertainment Awards 2008 being announced at a gathering of the great and good of the world’s mobile industry.

I’m delighted to report that for the 2nd year in a row, Bango won the Best Transactions Provider award, beating Dialogue, Ericsson IPX, Mblox, Netsize and Valista.

Not only was it a successful night for us but also for many of our customers. In nearly every category there was a Bango customer or partner up for award.

Bango customer/partner category winners included:

Best Imaging Company – Fonestarz
Best Music Label – Sony BMG
Best Video Producer – Sky
Best Games Publisher – EA Mobile
Best Video Service Provider – Quickplay Media
Best Music Service Provider – Shazam
Best Publishing Platform – Volantis
Best Advertising & Marketing Company – AdMob
Best Search provider – Taptu

The Company’s 2008 Annual Report has been posted to shareholders together with the Notice of Annual General Meeting and the associated form of proxy. The Company’s AGM will be held at 12pm on Friday 19 September 2008 at the offices of ICIS, Aldermary House, 10-15 Queen Street, London, EC4N 1TX.

View the 2008 AGM Notice, 2008 AGM Notice Explanatory Notes and 2008 AGM New Articles.

The Bango 2008 Annual report is available for download here: http://bangoinvestor.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/bangoannrep-08-ol_web.pdf

In addition to the financials, there is a lot of useful information about Bango and our business in this document.

The cover of the report of made up of hundreds of small flags – representing the global activity we have built up.  As our Mobile Analytics products augment our Mobile Payments products we expect the global buzz around Bango to intensify.

The CEO of Bango recently presented to a group of Mobile Industry types, who were interested what Bango’s view of the Mobile Analytics opportunity was.

As Bango is the current leader in the field of Mabile Analytics, they wanted to understand how big the opportunity might be and how we were planning to sustain our competitive edge and leadership.

This presentation helped demonstrate that the market opportunity could be hundreds of millions of dollars in 2011, and that Bango is in a good position to take a sizeable chunk of that market.

Visit http://www.slideshare.net/rayand/mobile-analytics-opportunity-presentation to view or download the presentation.

Bango (AIM: BGO) the mobile web platform provider, has won the ‘Best Mobile Internet Use’ Award presented by the Mobile Data Association (MDA) on July 1 2008. These prestigious industry awards recognise companies and individuals that have made an outstanding and innovative contribution to the rapidly growing UK mobile data industry.

This means Bango has won two awards in two weeks, after picking up a special Gold Award at the Mobile Content Awards last week. Read more