Mercury Mobility and m.Net to merge

Stuart Corner
Monday, 07 September 2009 11:56

IT Industry - Strategy

m.Net claims to be Australia's leading full service mobile marketing solutions company. It designs, builds and manages mobile destinations, provides content aggregation services, and delivers end-to-end mobile marketing campaigns to drive traffic to customers mobile sites.

In 2008 it was ranked by Business Review Weekly as the fifth fastest growing company in Australia and the fastest growing technology company. In the past five years m.Net has grown revenues from $525,000 to in excess of $7.8m.

Mercury Mobility has operations in Brisbane, Canada and New Zealand. It uses its own technology to manage content and optimise carrier content sales via its Media Retail Platform. The company claims to produce high margin content and to manage content for all major record labels, independent record labels and some of the world's largest entertainment brands. It claims to have digital assets under management comprising 0.75 million audio tracks, 50,000 ringtones, 5000 videos and 1500 video ringtones.

During the FY09 year it claims to have won a major contract to manage and distribute digital content for Bell Canada.

However its recent financial performance has been less than spectacular. For the year to 30 June 2009, revenue was down 14 percent to $5.5m, and net loss after tax up 68 percent to $2.7m. Despite this it was able to improve EBITDA significantly, from negative $1.6m in FY08 to negative $0.21m in FYO9. It said that the full year loss was mainly due to non-cash impairment of intangible assets and write off of deferred tax assets. The company ended the year with $1.2m in cash, down from $1.5m a year earlier.