Nimble BrainJuicer (BJ) is taking on the mammoths of the marketing industry by introducing new ways of determining customer preferences. Most of its services use panels of consumers on the basis (called crowd theory) that a gathering of unrelated people can pick product winners. But BJ has now gone a step further and started to introduce DigiViduals and SatisTraction. The former uses "research robots" to trawl Twitter and other social media sites to build up a detailed picture of an individual's consumer preferences; SatisTraction measures how customers feel towards a particular brand, giving advance warning of brand sales rising or falling.
The big attraction of BJ's services is their cheapness. In 2009 the company undertook 600 projects at an average cost of £20,000 per project. Last year, the comparable figures were nearly 750 and £22,000. And for this money a project could predict the success of 15 different products in any one country. So, not surprisingly, 11 of the 20 largest market research buyers use BJ's services while 2010's figures included 89 per cent repeat business.
Broker Canaccord forecasts 2011 revenues of £21.7m, pre-tax profits of £2.62m and EPS of 13.97p (11.7p in 2010).
BRAINJUICER (BJU) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ORD PRICE: | 243.5p | MARKET VALUE: | £30.3m | |
| TOUCH: | 240-247p | 12-MONTH HIGH: | 243.5p | LOW: 149.5p |
| DIVIDEND YIELD: | 1.0% | PE RATIO: | 21 | |
| NET ASSET VALUE*: | 43p | NET CASH: | £2.77m | |
| Year to 31 Dec | Turnover (£m) | Pre-tax profit (£m) | Earnings per share (p) | Dividend per share (p) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2006 | 4.6 | 0.13 | -0.9 | nil |
| 2007 | 6.6 | 0.89 | 5.2 | nil |
| 2008 | 9.3 | 1.37 | 7.6 | 1.5 |
| 2009 | 11.8 | 1.66 | 9.2 | 1.9 |
| 2010 | 16.7 | 2.22 | 11.7 | 2.4 |
| % change | +39 | +34 | +27 | +26 |
Ex-div: 1 Jun Payment: 24 Jun Aim: Media *Including intangible assets of £1.62m, or 13p a share | ||||
