Published on: January 29, 2019

A strong finish to 2018

Sopheon’s brief trading update earlier in January stated that revenues for the year ended 31 December 2018 would be ‘comfortably in line’ with market expectations, with early indications that EBITDA and pre-tax profits would show stronger outperformance. Today’s announcement expects that reported revenues for the year ended 31 December 2018 will be over U$33 million compared to our estimate of U$31.6 million. With lower costs than planned, EBITDA and pre-tax profits are ‘significantly ahead’ of market expectations. Sopheon ended the year with net cash of around U$16.7 million – well ahead of our estimate of U$12.8 million. The announcement confirms a very active licence pipeline and highlights its ‘solid’ commercial profile in both the USA and EU, with rising interest from Asia through its partnership activity. In all, this has been a strong end to 2018 for Sopheon and there is significant momentum going into 2019. We adjust estimates to take account of this update with revenue estimates increasing by 4% for each of our forecast years. Adj EBITDA for FY 2018E increases by 14% to U$8.7 million while our equivalent number for FY 2019E remains unchanged to reflect the shift of some of Sopheon’s hiring programme into that financial year.