Data company WANdisco (WAND) is to supply its live data platform, WANdisco Fusion, to a global automotive and truck manufacturer. The platform will be used by the automotive company as the standard for hybrid cloud and cloud migration for Microsoft Azure, where business-critical data will reside both on-premises and in the cloud. The contract will initially be worth $200,000 (£152,000) in annual recurring revenue from October, but since the initial agreement covers just 3 per cent of the new customer’s data pool the annualised value could climb to multi-million dollars in the coming years. Chief executive David Richards said the deal illustrated the "strategic importance" of WANdisco’s partnership with Microsoft.
WANdisco is busy shifting its revenue base from large but difficult-to-forecast contracts to more predictable, annually-recurring cloud sales. As such, Stifel analysts believe this deal reinforces the progress WANdisco has made on this "strategic direction" by improving financial visibility and underpinning the shift from on-premises data, as seen with its Hadoop product, to cloud data with Fusion. The downside is that bookings are likely to continue to be subdued in the short term, as multi-million dollar contracts are replaced with several hundred thousand dollar deals. Indeed, during the first half, total bookings fell 12 per cent to $9m.
Stifel expects a pre-tax loss of $0.9m during 2018, giving a loss per share of 0.2¢, compared with losses of $2.1m and 0.2¢ in 2017, but a $2m pre-tax profit in 2019.
| WANDISCO (WAND) | ||||
| ORD PRICE: | 616p | MARKET VALUE: | £257m | |
| TOUCH: | 604-616p | 12-MONTH HIGH: | 1,250p | LOW: 508p |
| DIVIDEND YIELD: | NA | PE RATIO: | NA | |
| NET ASSET VALUE: | 44¢* | NET CASH: | $13m | |
| Half-year to 30 Jun | Turnover ($m) | Pre-tax profit ($m) | Earnings per share (¢) | Dividend per share (¢) |
| 2017 | 9.7 | -6.3 | -17.0 | nil |
| 2018 | 5.7 | -11.2 | -27.0 | nil |
| % change | -41 | - | - | - |
| Ex-div: | na | |||
| Payment: | na | |||
| *Includes $6.2m of intangible assets, or 15¢ a share £1=$1.32 | ||||
