I started attending the ShareSoc growth seminars last year and the line-up presented in November is pretty typical in that all of the presenting companies are small but promising. However with five presentations on the bill it was a pretty intense evening and I'm glad that I took some notes even if it's taken me six months to write them up! What is interesting is how well a couple of the companies have done since then and none have disgraced themselves in the intervening period.

IS Solutions

IS Solutions is a specialist in data that has, somewhat surprisingly, been listed on AIM since 1997 (having formed in 1985). So they rode the dot-com bubble and hit an all-time high of 280p way back in 2000! Since then it's been a long slog back from a low of 5p in 2003 with real excitement only hitting the shares in September 2015 when the impact of acquiring Celebrus (earlier in the year) led to an outperform trading statement being issued. Apparently this new division offers much higher margins than the traditional business and thus a step change in profits; analyst forecasts are for £2.5-3.5M in 2016/17 compared to 500-800K in previous years. No wonder the share price has nearly tripled since Celebrus came on board!

The market for business intelligence and analytics is fast growing; companies have too much data and need help to analyse it. So IS Solutions provide impressive multi-channel collection and analysis in real time through a patented "tag free" collection technology. This "big data" can then be analysed to drive marketing campaigns, identify potentially fraudulent activity and otherwise engage with customers. However, like many tech firms, IS Solutions would like to generate more recurring revenue - at the moment this is only a quarter of sales with project work accounting for over half of all revenue. It does seem that analytics is helping to drive this change though and the new focus now provides 72% of revenue (and hopefully 100% in future?).

Covering the six month period to September 2015 what really impresses is the turn-around of the business; from a net loss in H1 2014 to a net profit in H1 2015 which out-stripped the whole of 2014! This is definitely an improving business and back in November the 5p forecast looked too low (against even just doubling…

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