Appier achieves historically high growth rate of 56% YoY
Appier Group has announced its financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2022.
Appier's growth in the second quarter was attributed to three key factors. Firstly, AI-powered solutions continue to deliver measurable returns for clients, prompting them to continue or expand their partnerships with Appier; secondly, Appier has achieved continued success in the US and EMEA given their large digital economies; and finally, substantial growth and expansion into other verticals in Asia Pacific has further deepened Appier's market presence.
Appier's continuing improved sales productivity and increasing usage from existing customers drove its revenue to 4.4 billion yen, with a historic high growth rate of 56% year-on-year (YoY), and gross profit grew by 57% YoY, the company states.
The company's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) saw a 6 percentage points YoY improvement, while operating margin improved by 7 percentage points YoY.
The growth in the number of customers adopting more than two Appier solutions, along with considerable new customer wins, demonstrates Appier's strong business resilience.
Appier's recurring revenue currently constitutes over 95% of its total revenue, which drove Appier's annual recurring revenue (ARR) to 16.6 billion yen with a YoY growth rate of 53%.
Emerging growth drivers across different regions will continue to fuel this momentum with more predictable business opportunities, the company states. Appier's AI technology plays an increasingly important role in privacy-focused and ROI-oriented markets.
Appier's last twelve months (LTM) net revenue retention (NRR) grew to a historic high of 127.3%, with its number of customers increasing to 1,228 with a 30% YoY growth.
Customer churn rate also decreased to 0.62%, the lowest in Appier history. New customers were mainly from the e-commerce and entertainment industries (34% and 25% of total new customers, respectively), driven by post-COVID demand for digital transformation and changing consumption patterns.
Further expansion to top-tier customers in other verticals also deepened Appier's market presence. Appier revised up its guidance for the fiscal year to reflect its outperformance in the second quarter, forecasting 18.5 billion yen total revenue for the year, with YoY revenue growth rate further accelerated to 46% from 41%.
A profitable second half of the year is expected given stronger revenue growth and better operating leverage. Appier's recession-proof offerings, higher business resilience and larger TAM are key drivers for this guidance revision for 2022, the company states.
Guidance in gross profit has outpaced top-line growth to 9.6 billion yen with 54% YoY growth rate. Operating loss has been revised to 84 million yen, with significant improvements compared to Appier's original guidance and getting closer to breaking even, while full-year positive EBITDA profit has been revised to 1.07 billion yen with a 2,423% YoY growth rate.
Appier continues to maintain a presence in Asia Pacific, alongside further expansion to other verticals and geographies.
Dr. Chih-Han Yu, CEO and co-founder of Appier, says, "Our strong momentum over the past two quarters underscores Appier's significant growth alongside our customers. In particular, we achieved our highest year-on-year growth rate in the past three years. We are confident our solid business metrics will continue to see us through the second half of the year.
"Turning AI into ROI by making software intelligent will enable us to have a better chance at winning customers and transforming their budgets and investments into visible, high returns, helping them to better cope with market uncertainties and potential risks through Appier's AI technologies and product differentiations."
ROI-driven intelligent AI solutions empower product synergies Appier's solutions maximise customers' product synergies and impact the customer journey. Customers can now turn AI into ROI and exploit their full-funnel data with higher efficiency across all stages, the company states.
Appier believes that AI is the key component in the first party data world. Appier offers businesses real-time and precise prediction and advertising through three approaches:
Synergic AIXON and AIXPERT bundled solutions: To benefit from inferred insights generated from first party data, allowing them to further optimise their marketing spending through higher AI accuracy and timely user insights. Applying these insights to auto-adjusting budget and bidding strategies enable businesses to make smarter campaign decisions and seize potential business opportunities.
Combined AIQUA and BotBonnie solutions: With a single unified interface, businesses can now form an omnichannel customer journey map across multiple conversational channels (LINE, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.) and owned channels (website, app) and gain a deeper understanding into user profiles. Businesses can then leverage these behavioural insights to take immediate action with tailored, real-time and personalised notifications.
AiDeal's smart promotion: Businesses can now use the power of machine learning and deep learning to predict and update hesitation scores along the user journey and dynamically generate the most optimal offering to individuals based on their purchase hesitancy.
With these, Appier states the company is uniquely positioned to help its customers tackle the entire customer journey across all aspects of the funnel. Appier's solutions are designed to help customer-centric companies build brand loyalty with their customers by arming them with a 360 view of the customer, using AI to deliver any actionable insights and turn a visitor into a customer, and a customer into a loyal one.
Appier states the company continues to focus on transformation and these cross-product synergies are a result of Appier's ethos towards innovation.
