Brainjuicer (LON:BJU), the online market research agency, presented a strong set of results for the financial year to December 2010 during an extended briefing at their London HQ that they dubbed “InvestorFest.” CFO James Geddes kicked the event off by presenting the group's 2010 results:

Revenue was up 38% to £16.4 million, pre-tax profits increased by 34% to £2.2 million and diluted EPS increased by 26% to 11.3p. Operating cash flow more than doubled to £2.9 million (FY2009: £1.3 million). 

The growth in sales was driven by a dramatic recovery in the UK business and continued North American market penetration. UK sales were flat in 2009 (against a backdrop of a significant sales contraction in the market research industry as a whole), but bounced back strongly in 2010, growing 42% to £7.9 million. North American sales increased by 61% to $4.1 million. BrainJuicer’s newer offices in Switzerland and Germany achieved similar revenue growth of 62% (to £1.4 million) and 41% (to £778,000). The Netherlands was the only region to experience a contraction in sales (12% to £2 million), as its local team reorganised following the departure of its MD and its largest client redistributed market research work to other regions. In the developing world, BrainJuicer’s start-up operations in China and Brazil each achieved initial sales of about £80,000.

Following the results presentation, BrainJuicer COO Alex Batchelor made a short presentation on the progress that BrainJuicer has made on the operational front in the last year. Batchelor discussed some of the challenges of BrainJuicer’s growth, and how the company plans to scale the business in the years to come. BrainJuicer supports these teams with a central infrastructure that manages the delivery of online surveys. For many years, BrainJuicer delivered its online surveys using an IT platform based on a Microsoft Access database. While generally reliable, this technology was not designed to store data on a really large scale, and the system’s performance was starting to suffer as the company did more surveys (a big problem was that surveys loaded slowly, which caused respondents to drop out). To address the problem BrainJuicer developed a new system, based on modern Microsoft SQL databases. The system was largely completed in 2010, and it is now gradually being rolled out. Performance is reportedly much improved, and its capacity is about 5 times current volume.

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