With crowd restrictions across professional sports brought upon by the pandemic, mass cuts across off-field departments resulted due to ticket sale losses. However, one glaring essential through the tough conditions was sports data analytics provided by Catapult (ASX: CAT).
This was evidenced by the USD $33.2m revenue reported by Catapult for the Half-Year ending 31 December 2020 despite tough economic conditions where coaches and support staff across professional sports were let go en masse in response to ticket sale losses.
While some professional leagues have resumed with heavily restricted crowds and others barring crowds all together, Catapult’s $33.2m revenue was just a 4% decline on their H1 FY20 results prior to the onset of COVID-19. This was strongly supported by the sports tech company’s “SaaS-ifying” of their business model toward subscription revenues for their data analytics and away from their traditional business which relied on product sales of their wearable devices.
“Our goals during this unprecedented period were to prioritise high-margin subscription sales over capital sales, drive multi-solutions adoption among our existing customers, keep churn low, generate cash, and continue to improve the position of Catapult for growth when this pandemic is behind us,” said Catapult CEO, Will Lopes.
With fewer sales opportunities through the pandemic where Catapult’s global sales force had few opportunities to present to teams and leagues, the Company increased its R&D activities over the period. These expenses were captured in Catapult’s $4.5m net loss for the Half-Year but the company remains well funded, generating free cash flow of $8.8m while extinguishing a major debt facility in November 2020.
Already with one of the world’s largest sports data networks for high-performance analytics, Catapult saw an 8.3% increases in their Annualised Contract Value – the key measurement for their subscription services – and a 1.6% increase in Average Customer Lifetime to 6.1 years.
“I am also very pleased to have seen how essential our solutions were to our customers. Despite the difficult period for our customers with slashed budgets and staff retrenchments, our ACV retention was the best we have ever seen,” Lopes added.
“These results continue to demonstrate how resilient our business is and I am very bullish that we are well positioned to return to accelerating growth when this pandemic is behind us.”
With global sports having overcome the worst of the pandemic, Catapult remains well positioned to build sales momentum having continued to sign new teams and leagues across Europe, North America and Asia in recent months, across multiple sports.
Catapult was also recently awarded a Performance & Health contract by the US Army Special Forces to assist them with performance monitoring of soldiers in training, opening up future opportunities in the digital health and wellness sector.
*All $ figures referenced in this article are in USD with Catapult changing its reporting format from previous ASX releases reported in AUD.
Alfred Chan is a Business Reporter at The Sentiment specialising in ASX-listed small cap companies, a bloodstock enthusiast and former equities analyst.
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